


first drafts

by clumsyhearts



Category: Riverdale (TV 2017)
Genre: AU, F/M, in which i am an idiot, slow burn (I hope)
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-01-03
Updated: 2019-06-10
Packaged: 2019-10-03 20:20:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 28,500
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17290736
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/clumsyhearts/pseuds/clumsyhearts
Summary: in which co-editors of a school newspaper live, fight, and cry with each other, and learn that not everything about life has to be written down.or: simplicity, cravings, and everything after.





	1. simplicity.

**Author's Note:**

> hi. a few quick notes:
> 
> \- this story is set near the beginning of junior year.  
> \- i've written in an AU that i (think) i've created, in which neither betty & jughead nor archie & veronica have started dating... yet.  
> \- with this rather large exception aside, everything else is canon-compliant up to the beginning of season three. from there, i went nuts.  
> \- rated t+ for swearing and mentioned/implied self-harm.  
> \- i am VERY slow at updating, so apologies ahead of time for that. :)
> 
> go on and read, then, grasshoppers.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> act one, scene one - in which we meet the loyal, if not depressing, wordsmith, and the faithful editor. grease references and alice cooper intervene. plans are made. end scene.

_jughead jones._

There’s a certain charm that radiates off of a small town. Familiarity. Comfort. The friendliness that comes from knowing everything about your neighbors. The seemingly untapped mine of secrets that unabashedly follows every new family into the doors of their tidy, familiar homes.

For Jughead, it’s routine. Little in his life screams of comfort, literally in the sense of the couch that’s been keeping him from a satisfying sleep for five years now and figuratively in the sense of his wallet. His neighbors liked their privacy, and Jughead couldn’t blame them. The charm in a small town for him, then, must come in the form of his daily routine, rarely changed and ever punctual.

Jughead slams open the door to the _Blue and Gold_ , pulling off his earbuds and stuffing them into a coat pocket as he heads to his desk and unceremoniously slams his books onto the table. This is his morning routine. Whether or not he has a story to write in the newsroom (he usually doesn’t; his procrastination tendencies, thankfully, only let him put off major work until the day before, rather than the day of), his presence in the room that smells of the old ink that’s been left open for too long is required.

“Good _morning_ ,” Betty quips sardonically from the back of the room. This, too, is routine, but one of the more fluid parts of his day. Sometimes, for example, Betty will greet him with a grunt if she’s not finished with her coffee yet, and other days he finds himself with a rather formal “Hello, how are you?” to answer. 

Today, her laptop lies open in front of her as she proofreads this week’s headliner, filing her nails. “What’s bothering _you_ , Danny Zuko? Did you wake up on the wrong side of the mattress?”

Danny Zuko because Betty loves annoying him with films that are too cheesy for his palette. Mattress because Betty knows him, and she knows about his lack of a four-poster. 

He groans. “I didn’t wake up at all.” His night was spent finishing a physics essay that he definitely should not have put off until the last minute. (Also routine.) He’d downed a five-hour-energy just before coming to school, but those bottles lasted for about thirty-minute increments rather than the full five hours they promised. 

“The plot thickens,” Betty drawls. Her voice is filled with honey today, Jughead notices. Almost too sweet. He shakes off the feeling as she glances up at him from above the frame of her laptop. “Did Mr. Zuko finally find his adorable heroine Sandy Olsson, who, despite the fact that she’s unequivocally gorgeous, does not pass the Bechdel test?”

All routine. Their familiar banter, her familiar ponytail, his familiar sarcasm lacing the air.

“Or did Danny have to fight off the other gang?” Betty continues. She knows this, too. His family, the snakeskin they all shared. The only thing keeping him and Danny Zuko from being twins is Zuko’s good personality and Jughead’s idiotic hat. “ _Shit_ , what were they called? Was there even another gang?”

Jughead rolls his eyes as he settles heavily into the seat that no longer groans under the pressure of weight. He’s not a heavy man, built more like a beanpole than a football player, but the chairs in the newsroom used to be so old and rickety that they creaked under any weight. Now, just like the two of them, the chairs were settling in. “You need to work on your _Grease_ references.”

Betty cocks an eyebrow. “If it was so bad, I’d like to see you come up with a better one.” The nail file rubs her fingertips in a way that makes them bleed. She’s filed far past the nails now. An old routine that she hadn’t kept up with in some time, but a routine nonetheless. 

“I’m thinking more along the lines of S.E. Hinton,” he suggests, trading the stylized and tune-carrying Greasers for the more serious and vicious gangs found in _The Outsiders_.

“Ponyboy, Zuko, take your pick.”

“Anyways,” Jughead sighs, trying to ignore the sound of Betty’s nail file grinding against dead skin, “if I found Sandy Olsson last night, I don’t know if I want her. The only thing I found last night was a fly in the middle of my coffee, god rest its tiny soul, and the end of my will to live at the beginning of my physics essay.”

Betty makes a face and slams her laptop shut, tossing her nail file on the desk. “Let’s _not_ discuss that physics essay. Did you just start it yesterday?”

“Oh, shut up.”

She raises her eyebrows. “Mmm. I’m taking your lack of a true answer as a certain yes. Well? Is the essay as thorough as Darcy would like it? You know. Explaining everything in great detail at the last possible minute is like a Jane Austen gold mine. A chemical equation functions in the same way.”

Another of Betty’s routines is splitting up her sentences where a natural cadence doesn’t exist. Anxiety-inducing pauses where pauses shouldn’t go between related sentences accompanied Jughead’s first month of listening to Betty, but, like everything else about her, it’s a natural routine now as it ever was.

In her fashion, she finally adds, “Love plus wealth equals happiness – a balanced equation. Even if the guy you’re dating is kind of a creep.”

“You’re in a mood today,” Jughead notices as he steals one of her paperclips to pin his essay together. He knows perfectly well that she keeps the clips within his reach because he has none of his own, but that doesn’t stop him from palming the paperclip nonchalantly. Not making a scene is a Jughead specialty. He continues poking fun at her with a “What, did you infiltrate the library last night and eat all the books?”

“You know perfectly well that _Grease_ is a musical, Jones. And you also happen to know how much I love Jane Austen.” 

He does, in fact, happen to know how much she loves Jane Austen, although she’s more of an Agatha Christie fan herself. As for Jughead, he prefers not to spend six hours watching the _Pride and Prejudice_ BBC special.

“It’s mindless,” Betty would argue. “I fold laundry while I watch it. Plus, Colin Firth is in it.”

“Still stupid,” Jughead would counter. “But at the same time, a brilliant social commentary. Austen was truly underappreciated.”

Betty snaps her fingers, bringing Jughead back from his memories, as she remembers something obviously important. (Another routine. Betty asks and Jughead agrees, no matter what. Only occasionally, and only when Jughead has something interesting going on, does this routine happen the opposite way.)

Jughead has to restrain himself from agreeing to whatever she asks before she even opens her mouth. He zips up his backpack after replacing his physics essay in the folder and glances up at her as she begins to speak.

“I just remembered that this weekend my mom asked me to –”

“Asked?” he chuckles. Alice Cooper never asks for anything. She _demands_. 

“– _told_ me to go down to Sweetwater River for the Jubilee this year, because apparently that’s where Hermione Lodge wants to hold it. She wants me to scope out the situation. See what’s what in Riverdale this year. Report on it for the _B & G_. And…”

“… you want me to come with you.” Jughead finishes her sentence, meeting her eyes.

In lieu of a reply, she simply quirks one eyebrow. A classic Betty Cooper move. Right on time, his heart skips that familiar beat.

Routine, routine, routine.

He’s not sure why, but today the word is making him ill.

Betty cuts in between his thoughts with a “So are you in or do I have to make you come in Saturday to write next week’s headliner?”

“I already _wrote_ next week’s headliner,” he complains. “ _Greendale and Riverdale: The Same Old Problems in Vastly Different Towns_. Don’t make me come in to write a story I’ve already written.”

“I suppose it was an empty threat.”

“But yes, I’ll go with you.” 

She grins, a real grin, for a half a second, before it stretches too far and the flaking skin on her lips reveals the real reason she’s been filing her nails this morning. A routine he’d thought they’d buried with the first drafts months ago. 

Jughead might not know Betty better than her best friend Veronica, but he knows Betty’s anxious habits. He’s spent hours with her in this room under high stress and pressure, lifelines hanging around them in the form of shutting down the paper rather than deal with deadlines. While Jughead ate compulsively when he was faced with anxiety, Betty dug her nails into her palms and peeled at the skin on her lips until they bled, coating her teeth with red. All routine for the two of them, once every month. 

Alice Cooper must have done a number on Betty today to drive her back into caring about her manicures and peeling the skin off her lips.

“What else did Alice tell you?” Jughead asks, leaning forward in his chair. As per usual, he’s sitting in the chair backwards, legs straddling the back. 

She sighs and opens her mouth as if to say something, but the school bell cuts her off before she can get a word out. She shakes her head, ponytail swinging left, then right, then left again, as if to enunciate the silent point she’s making of _not now_. “It’s unimportant,” she sighs. “Just my mom being her delightful self.” Her honeyed voice hardens and changes key, as if she’s switching from one segment of an orchestral piece to the next segment. “ _Betty, you aren’t working hard enough_ ,” she snarls, playing the character of her mother. “ _Betty, you need to pay these bills. Betty, you’re hideous and you need to lose some weight. You look like season-five Betty Draper, and those jeans are not appealing on a season-five Betty Draper._ ”

Jughead shoulders his backpack and puts a hand on her shoulder. “Betts, I’m sorry. You know she’s just upset with something and taking out on you and your jeans.” 

He knows she knows. This is Betty, after all, and Jughead knows Betty. 

“Last time she told me I wasn’t fitting into my clothes,” Betty says, inhaling a shaky breath, “I ate nothing but salads for the next month. My mom was so _fucking_ proud of me. _Oh, Betty, look at all these nice dresses you can fit into now_!”

She laughs, but it’s evidently forced. His sobriety at her joke causes her to stop and shake her head. “Sorry,” she mutters. “I’m… not myself today.”

His routine’s been broken before, but he’s pretty sure that seven-thirty in the morning is some sort of record. Usually, a break in routine makes the small town he lives in seem _that_ much smaller, but today, the skip in the record of his mundane life is almost intoxicating, even if everything about the situation is infuriating. The good breaks in routine came with unnecessary laughter. Skiving off class and paying for it in detention later. This break was maddening, and it tended to make Jughead want to punch things. 

Alice Cooper had a certain knack for squeezing her youngest daughter’s accomplishments into a pulp and reminding her of everything that grounded her to earth, but her favorite place to poke was Betty’s stomach. It certainly wasn’t helping matters that Betty ate more than a few helpings of fries every week. Came with the territory of befriending the food junkie.

“Hey, it’s okay,” he starts, squeezing her shoulder. “I know your mom’s a bitch, but whatever she says, you’re not fat and you deserve the happiness that only a burger and fries from Pop’s can give.”

She lets out a shaky exhale before patting Jughead’s hand. He lets his fingers fall from her shirt as she opens the door. “Thanks, Jug. Hey, I’ll text you about Saturday.”

“Sure. Sounds great.”

With her words, his routine that he’s lived with for a decade comes crashing down around his ears, back into perfect place again. Jughead can’t help but feel a little annoyed. Small-town charm can only last for so long. He frequently finds himself avidly searching for the reasons why he doesn’t just skip town, and the ponytail and its owner are always near the top of his list.

But routine, and all the small-town charm to go along with it, keeps him grounded. Routine wins him scholarships. Routine keeps his battered Converse on his feet and routine keeps orange juice in his fridge.

Jughead shoves his shitty earbuds in his ears, ignoring the way they pop and fizzle when they connect to his phone. Routine. Like everything else today.

He’s wondering, over the familiar music in his ears, when his routine will finally change.


	2. cravings.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> act one, scene two - the faithful editor unpacks her emotions and craves the kind of pain only her well-filed nails can provide. a crumpled five from the depressing wordsmith buys the editor breakfast. black smoke saves us from sure embarrassment. end scene.

_betty cooper._

The low rumble of a motorcycle is one of those pleasing, low sounds that digs right under her skin. Reminding her of the gentle timbre of a voice she knows well but can’t quite place, the battered bike on her street grumbles in indignation as its owner tries to start it up, but only gets halfway there. She can tell that the engine’s fighting the rider because it keeps coughing up black fumes, but the sound of the engine is gorgeous and raw. It’s what an old engine should very well sound like, and Betty can tell it only needs a good scrub-down of the air filter before it roars completely to life.

The motorcycle is slightly fuzzy in the distance through all the exhaust. But she can see the rider on top of it, kicking the gears into life. The gears are stumbling over themselves in way that aren’t mechanical, growling like…

Betty sits up hard in bed, listening to her stomach growl. _Dammit._ The previous night’s dinner – or lack thereof – sits lightly in her stomach. She couldn’t bring herself to eat in front of her mother’s watching eyes and couldn’t manage to find a logical excuse to leave the house and sneak out to eat at Pop’s. Since she's in bed at home, listening to her stomach growl, this means the bike and its owner had once again found their way into her dreams. 

More distressing than the recurring dream is the fact that Betty _knows_ the rider, or at least she thinks she does. The motorcycle’s purrs sound an awful lot like a familiar voice, but she wakes up too soon every time to see who the rider is. 

She hopes it’s not supposed to represent her father. Her therapist says she may begin seeing her father in everything, now that he’s gone, and Betty’s not really looking forward to finding her dad again. Not when she’d just managed to sleep through the night without waking in a cold sweat, thinking of her dad’s eyes in that mask. Her cravings haven’t been so simple in a long time. _I just don’t want to see my dad in my nightmares, please._

Whatever the driver is supposed to represent, it will have to wait, as her stomach growls at her angrily. She needs to get up and eat a bowl of cereal before Alice wakes and finds another reason to be mad at Betty for existing. 

_Usually_ , she reminds herself as her stomach folds inwards, _it’s not like this._ Usually her mother stays out of her way, lets her eat what she wants, lets her leave the house at unforgivable hours with only a sigh of admonishment when she returns in the morning. Usually her mother leaves her well enough alone. How could Alice be overbearing, after the year she’d just had? How could she carry on his overprotective personality, when she knew his personality had been exactly how he’d been sent to the slammer?

But recently, Alice’s confidence that she could control her daughter’s life resurged, and as Betty prepares to sneak downstairs for an apple or some juice or _something_ , she instead finds herself staring into the too-wide eyes of her mother as she stands dangerously close to Betty’s door.

“Oh, good, you’re up. You’ve got essays to write and tests to study for and scholarships to win!” her mother says loudly into the otherwise empty house. Laundry bin resting on her hip, Alice turns on a dime and begins to walk downstairs, a bit of flounce to her step. “And not a single bit of food, you hear me?” she adds as an afterthought, a somewhat threatening note hanging from the question mark. “Trust me, you’ll thank me later, honey. The pain just means you’re alive!”

 _Wonderful,_ Betty thinks. _I haven’t eaten in twenty-four hours, but I’m glad to know that “the pain” means I’m alive._

“Sweetheart,” Alice says from the stairs, meeting Betty’s eyes, “Stop dawdling and get dressed!”

_Make me, you bitch._

The bite of her nails into her ever-vulnerable flesh startles Betty. She glances down to see blood congealing under her fingernails, leaving a funny rust-colored stain that takes the place of the polish she filed off yesterday. The pattern of blood spilling and filling the crevice behind the nail is mesmerizing, but difficult to focus on with Alice’s constant yelling. Sighing, Betty retreats to her room, slams the door loud enough to let her mother know that she’s upset, and begins to dress herself. 

Later, she thinks, she would tell Archie about her morning and her crazy mother on her walk to school. That is, if he’s at home when she stops by. He’s taken to driving Josie McCoy to school recently (as Archie puts it, they’re “going steady.” His vocabulary hasn’t improved since middle school.) Betty had a knack for telling stories about her morning – making the smallest sentences seem like novels.

Betty doesn’t like to write near as much as she likes to tell stories. She breathes life into town history, in the facts that she dutifully recites on her rounds around the school tours that aren’t just facts but stories. She loves to spin words for her niece and nephew, who aren’t quite old enough to understand what she’s saying, but old enough to see how much she loves to say it. She breathes the words.

Unfortunately, there isn’t much of a rush for stories these days, at least not the ones Betty likes to write, so she’s stuck spending her days reviewing articles about ridiculous town events and correcting Jughead on his em-dash use. _Seriously, Jug, just end the sentence already,_ she finds herself saying to him frequently. _No need for that many semicolons. I don’t even know if anyone else knows what those are._

 _Betty, I love my long sentences, so shut your ass up_ , he’d reply tiredly with his hand combed through his hair.

Jughead the realist, ever sane and writing about what matters; he keeps the _Blue and Gold_ on schedule and where it needs to be for monthly and weekly publications. And Betty, his editor. Betty the occasional writer. Betty the wannabe storyteller. Betty the caretaker. Betty, whose only remarkable quality was her extraordinary kindness. _Oh, that’s Elizabeth,_ Principal Wetherbee had told a new student once, using her full name instead of the preferred nickname. _She’s always nice._

Betty, generally insignificant unless someone needs her. 

Her shirt tugs on her earrings as she yanks the printed tee over her head a little too harshly. She knows that this kind of thinking is harmful for her, but this week has rolled her into a little ball of defense and is causing her to think without compassion for herself. Her stomach aches from the lack of food that’s been put in it for the past twenty-four hours, and all she’s craving right now is a big hug and a large pizza with mushrooms and basil.

It’s not helping matters that her best friends seem to be flaking around her this time of year. Veronica is becoming more closed off, soberer this year and more serious about her job with her family. And as much as Betty loves Archie, she has the sinking feeling that he finds her insignificant. When he dumps Josie, she’ll important again. When he gets his heart broken, she’ll be right there to pick up the pieces. When his car breaks down, she’ll be there to fix it. But she doesn’t believe she ultimately has a purpose with Archie unless it’s as his mechanic. 

Which is disappointing, because she’s been a little in love with him for a long, _long_ time. 

But no matter that now. It’s evident that Archie isn’t interested in her, after she essentially threw herself at him all freshman year and he didn’t even blink. (For a whole year, her cravings had been the same: The red-haired boy next door, and all his muscles to go with it. She wanted him served on a platter.)

But regardless of her past cravings and crushes, Betty needs to wake up and stop looking at him like he’s the answer to all of her problems. She _knows_ him. She knows that he’ll crumble under emotional weight and leave at the first sight of Alice Cooper’s snakeskin heels, but somehow her stupid heart won’t seem to listen to reason.

She thumps downstairs, ducking out the front door before her mother can scream, and exhales a breath of relief as her stomach grumbles again. Her _head_ needs to listen to reason right now and she needs to eat. Sighing, she glances to the Andrews’ driveway, only to see Archie’s old junkyard car is gone again, and she starts off for school alone. 

Five minutes later, she finds herself still lost in thought in front of the vending machine. She digs her hand into her jeans pocket to pull out a few nickels and a wadded-up bill too big for these machines. Of course _today_ would be the day that she doesn’t have any money except for a fifty-dollar bill her mother had given her with the intent of buying new shoes.

 _Might as well have my breakdown early today_ , Betty thinks, _right in front of this machine and God and bloody everyone_. She was planning on having it later, in a more private setting, and hopefully over a lot of junk food, but what better time than the present?

She manages to hold herself steady, pushing past students who loiter at their lockers and shoving off concerns towards her with a smile and a nod. _You have to be nice. You have to be perfect. You have to be nice. You have to be perfect._

Once the door to the _Blue and Gold_ slams, she lets herself cry. This is the only public place she allows herself to break in simply because no one bothers to come in. She wants to yell at someone, anyone, whoever is closest and can take the beating, but she digs her fingers into her palm to relieve the craving of anger.

Today, Jughead’s here before she is, and he’s bent over his desk, scratching a memo out for Principal Wetherbee like Betty asked him to do yesterday. Seeing him so concentrated over something so futile softens the anger a little bit and lifts her fingernails, but the damage is already done. The red flows over her nails and gathers in her palms, satisfying the craving for pain. 

He hasn’t replaced his hat after riding his bike to school, so his slightly wet hair is hanging over his face. The hat itself lies forgotten at the corner of his desk, next to a pack of gum. Betty’s stomach lurches uncomfortably.

Without lifting his head, Jughead says, “You’re late today, Betts. Didn’t think you had it in you to become so – ah – White Rabbit-esque.”

It’s so stupid, how one person can make her feel so comfortable in her skin and so unlike the version of herself she presents at home. 

“ _Shit,_ ” he mutters. “Did I really just lower my film standards and reference a Disney movie?” He glances up at her to affirm his fears and scrunches up his face in worry. “Betts? What’s wrong?”

It’s so stupid, the reason why she’s crying, that she almost doesn’t tell him it’s because the vending machine is broken. But he’s already shoving back his seat and striding over to her.

“The vending machine,” Betty says, choking back the rest of her tears, “is broken, and I haven’t eaten in twenty-four hours.”

“Oh,” Jughead says, and if Betty’s eyes weren’t so clouded by tears, she’d think he would have just swallowed nervously from being in such close proximity to her. He rubs her shoulder with his left hand and digs in his right pocket, pulling out a crumpled five-dollar bill. “Here. Some chips are in order, I do believe.”

It’s so stupid that Jughead Jones, the black-haired Houlden Caulfield, is so close to her. It’s so stupid that she, who is supposed to be in love with Archie, finds herself laughing at Jughead’s jokes and rolling her eyes at Archie’s. It’s so stupid, the way this world works. 

But right now, Jughead is inches from Betty and she doesn’t think she can deal with any more emotions, least of all confusing ones that indicate that she’s not as smitten with her red-haired neighbor as she’d like to believe. She shoves the bile and cravings back down into her stomach where they belong and lets herself imagine that basil-and-mushroom pizza instead of standing right here in front of Jughead and her need for a hug.

She’s thankful that she doesn’t blush easily while she’s a crying mess, but Jughead suddenly realizes how close he’s standing to her and his face flushes on cue.

He clears his throat, steps backwards the tiniest bit.

“Jug…” she tries, but he cuts her off, waving the crumpled bill in from of her.

“Come on,” Jughead says, recovering his sense of humor as the blush fades from his cheeks. “You think I’d let my best editor starve? Do you know how many run-on sentences would go into our paper? How much tension would stay bottled up because I’d no longer have someone to fight good-naturedly with?”

She raises an eyebrow as he shoves the money into her hands, turning back to his desk to put his hat back on and pack up his homework.

“Jug,” she sighs, “I can’t take this. That’s your salary from Pop’s. That’s your gas money.”

Her stomach, _traitorous devil_ , growls at her. It’s craving those salty chips.

He turns around from the desk. She knows he’s heard her stomach grumble. She’s pretty sure that the whole high school heard it.

One corner of Jughead’s mouth quirks up into a grin. “Betty. Please. Eat something. Consider it my treat, and if you really want to, you can pay me back by fixing my bike before we go to the Jubilee this weekend, okay?”

 _Bikes. Okay._ Something she knows well. If there’s anything Betty loves more than telling stories to Juniper and Dagwood, it’s fixing motors. She exhales, probably a little too loudly. She folds her fingers around the bill and waits for Jughead to gather his backpack and the memo he was writing before heading to the student lounge to blow this cash on some goddamn chips. _God_ , she’s hungry.

“What’s wrong with your bike?” 

“I don’t know,” he says, slinging the bag over his shoulder. “The engine has just been a little pedantic lately. When I try to start the ignition, it coughs up about a jug of black smoke. Still starts, but I'm worried that one day soon I'll get stuck somewhere because she _won't_ start."

Betty hums in thought as the two of them weave through the crowds Betty had already braved this morning. She’s still kind of crying, but Jughead is tall and standing next to her, daring anyone to laugh at the tear tracks staining her cheeks. “That’s easy. I can fix that in about an hour with some extra hands.”

“Serious?” After all these years, he’s still dubious to her car-fixing skills. Time after time, she’s fixed his truck and bike, and time after time, he still doesn’t think half the problems with his old vehicles are as simple as they really are.

Motors and engines and grease are easy. There’s no emotion to deal with, just the underbelly of a car and a dirty rag and surefire ways to fix something. There’s no Alice Cooper, not while she’s working on a car or Jughead’s bike. Just her rough hands cleaning and stringing together broken wires effortlessly. There’s no craving, no hunger.

Just her and the engine.

“Yeah, that’s just your engine burning too much fuel,” Betty says, dismissing his worries with a flick of her wrist. “I don’t even really need to take it into the shop. I’ll check out your air filter and your pipes and clean ‘em out.” She pushes hard past a guy who’s sneering at her, and Jughead folds his fingers into a fist, watching the guy spin around her and leer from behind.

He snarls something under his breath that Betty can’t quite pick up, but she thinks it has something to do with _that stuck-up bastard_ and _gonna grind his ass into the ground._

As she punches her order into the vending machine, she taps his arm lightly. “Let it go, Jug, he’s just a creep.”

He sighs and leans up against the machine, watching as the two bags of chips and a case of fruit snacks fall to the floor of the vending machine. “Okay, Betty. Okay.”

She machine spits out the two quarters in change, and she presses them into his callused hands. He glances down at her bloody fingernails and open palms and shakes his head.

“I know,” she says.

He doesn’t say anything, only looks into her eyes from underneath the stubborn curls that escape his beanie. “You sure you don’t wanna crash on my couch for a few days?” he asks, repeating the offer he’d made her yesterday, when she’d first admitted her mother was pushing her too hard.

“It’s not that bad,” she mumbles through a mouthful of chips. She’s lying and Jughead knows it. But he knows better than to push her on a day like today, where she’s already been pushed past her breaking point. 

She uses her sleeve to wipe the tear tracks from her cheeks and tries to smile, but she can feel her lips splitting with the effort and quickly drops the act.

Betty doesn’t have to act in front of him anyways. He knows her. All of it. The good, the bad, the ugly. The makeup, the laughter, the chapped lips, the demon mothers. 

The cravings.

But she appreciates him pretending like he doesn’t notice the split in the middle of her lip. She appreciates the metaphorical applause he presents her at the end of her performance. On days like today, she needs to be Elizabeth Cooper, and that applause is a necessary part of her character. Whole and present. Always nice. The kind of girl that thinks stories are stupid and prefers red-haired boys to editing the newspaper.

On days like today, she shoves Betty into the closet and pretends like she doesn’t exist. She disappears in her own skin.

“Okay,” Jughead says, standing to his full height as the bell rings. “Okay, Betts. Okay.”

 _God_ , but he makes it so hard to disappear.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> protective jug is my favorite! sad betty is the worst! 
> 
> i promise we're gonna kick alice cooper's ass soon, don't worry.
> 
> i write (even more infrequently) on wattpad: @ffairlyfloral  
> pin with me: @ffairlyfloral  
> or find me reading other bughead fics right here on ao3: @clumsyhearts


	3. midnights.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> act one, scene three - the depressing wordsmith puts on a shabby suit and comforts the faithful editor. faithful editor gets her hands greasy and fixes a bike. we meet the red-haired retriever and the rich girl. unbalanced plot structure, horrible 80s teen movie references, and vanilla perfume abound. end scene.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this is 9k words and 15 pages on word so brew yourself a cup of tea and settle in for a wild and unbalanced ride, grasshoppers. **_TRIGGER WARNING: ABUSE._**

_jughead jones._

Words have been filling Jughead with a certain disgust today that usually only accompanies him when faced with a Caesar salad, settling in his stomach with dread and nausea before he even shovels the forkful of greens into his mouth.

Typically, he loves to write. Words are his lifeblood. They surround him like air, injecting themselves into his bloodstream without much conscious thought. But today, the air around him stills with the quiet anticipation that accompanies moments before bad news is shared.

( _Damn_ , that was a good line. He knows when he puts his fingers on the keys to memorialize this line, he’ll lose his head.)

Maybe his inspiration for writing is fading today. Or maybe it’s the unnatural blinking neon light that reflects off of all the glass mugs in the bar, creating the aura of mystery within the diner. Maybe it’s the last two teenagers in the diner, Jughead excluded, who are laying on top of each other where they think he can’t see them in the very back of the diner. At least they’d kept their clothes on. 

By this hour at Pop’s Chock-lit Shoppe, he usually has the place to himself to sit and write, but his fingers can only manage to type out a sentence before he freezes. Maybe it is the couple in the back that’s making him anxious.

Even more likely is the feeling of impending doom, stemming from his invitation to Alice Cooper’s midnight dinner.

Betty has never been allowed to invite guests to her mother’s infamous dinners, and she’d been startled to see her mother temporarily change her mind. “It’s like my mom’s been possessed,” she’d said to him in the hallway this morning when she told him about it, a tiny, but familiar gleam in her eyes that Jughead was glad to see again. He could only handle so many days of Betty’s eyes being dead before he started to go crazy with an unfamiliar protective feeling. “I never get to do shit like this.”

“It’s wild,” he agreed, as she popped open her locker to grab a physics textbook, the pages dog-eared after years of use. Some folded pages and notes in textbook are old, remnants of another class of physics students, full of misshapen and stylized words like alphabet soup, but the purple pen tucked in the cover is all hers. “So how are you going to use this bout of freedom? No, wait. _Please_ tell me you invited Archie.”

Archie is terrified of Alice Cooper, in an irrational-phobia sense. It’s like he thinks that Alice will turn into Edward Scissorhands one day and rip out his eyes just for existing. As Jughead is his best friend, it is his solemn duty to make sure that Archie is as thoroughly embarrassed as possible whenever possible.

“I did invite Archie,” Betty said, kicking her locker shut.

“ _Fuck_ yes.”

“But he said absolutely not. He didn’t want to pick a fight with my mom. I think he thinks my mom’s got cameras on everyone.”

Jughead chuckled. Betty’s mom did indeed have the aura of knowing everything about the people she meets. 

“But,” Betty said, hugging her book against her chest, “I still have an open spot at the midnight table. Unless, of course, you wanted to scope out the situation. See _just_ how batshit crazy my mother is these days.”

She was daring him to say no and Jughead knew it. 

It would be disappointing to break routine now, he supposes, after sticking to it for over three years. Not when his bike still needed fixing and he didn’t have the money to pay her to do it. _Definitely_ not when he had nothing better to do on a Friday night.

“Fine,” Jughead sighed. “I’ll dig out my only suit from the back of my closet and dust it off thoroughly. But I’m not taking off my hat.”

“Deal.” Betty squeezed his wrist in a gesture that said more words than Jughead could handle and left him standing outside physics, feeling as though a semi-truck had pounded over his still-beating heart.

“More fries, Jughead?” Pop asks, jolting him out of his memory. Jughead shakes his head, lifting his fingers from his useless keyboard. No point in pretending to work tonight. 

“Should probably cut down on the amount of salt I inject into my bloodstream,” he drawls, effortlessly covering his anxieties with his sardonic sense of humor. “At this point, if I drop dead, we can assume that the killer is back in Riverdale and I’ve collapsed after having a panic-induced heart attack due to the pure saltine content in my blood.”

Pop doesn’t laugh, but he does shake his head a little as he clears the last occupied table, purposefully avoiding looking in back corner, where there are now subtle groans emitting from the bench. “You’re a bright kid, Jughead,” Pop says, carrying the plates back towards the kitchen. “But sometimes you scare me.”

Jughead laughs out loud, and a sound that is too much like a plunger being pulled from a clogged sink comes from the back corner.

He shakes his head in wonder. It can’t be _comfortable_ , can it? Jughead’s decade-old shitty couch has to be more comfortable than these booths. He looks back for a second, watching the shadows of the two move across the opposite bench, before looking away. Although the pair were hidden behind the tall backs of the benches, it still felt far too personal to watch their shadows dance a well-rehearsed number.

He’s never tried to write romance before. He supposes it would be invigorating to write about something he’d never really experienced, but he’s not even good at writing what he _knows_. True crime happens to be one of Jughead’s passions, and even so, his latest draft of the true crime novel he’s always dreamed of writing is currently toeing the thin line of literary genius and the recycle bin.

Sliding a twenty across the counter for his pre-Midnight Dinner, he begins to shove his laptop and writing supplies into his bag. The minute hand wanders lazily towards 11:45 when he slams out of Pop’s early, thumping down the stairs towards his parked motorbike.

While he laces up his riding boots over his suit pants – which is a fashion statement if Jughead ever saw one – and secures his rucksack to the back of the bike, he thinks about the strangeness of blood oaths and family lines and friendships.

The Coopers and Joneses aren’t supposed to like each other. They’re from opposite sides of the tracks, have conflicting interests, and a twisted backstory more confusing than tracing mythological lineage. And FP and Alice _despise_ each other. Their blood-rot hatred extends to their children, raven-haired and green-eyed, respectively.

In Alice’s eyes, Jughead Jones is Undesirable No. 1. Not only did her lovely and perfect daughter befriend the son of a criminal and a drunk, she _hangs out_ with him. Frequently. And she invites him to dinner, to work together on late nights when publishing deadlines hung over their heads like the ghost of King Hamlet. Jughead wears black coats and has dark smiles, and Alice _hates_ him.

And Betty Cooper somehow made it on FP’s hit list too. His son, who was supposed to carry on the family line, join the Serpents, and live an easy, if not unfulfilling, life, instead started writing for the school newspaper because of her. Never mind that it redeemed his hopes for scholarships. For college. For a life of opportunity beyond the next paycheck and the next keg. Betty’s sweet. _Too_ sweet. Far too sweet for someone as sour as a Jones.

The bike kicks into gear and he takes off from the parking lot of Pop’s, peeling onto the main road with the kind of practiced ease that can only come from knowing the roadmaps of this town by heart.

His hearts thrums in time to the engines on his bike, which trip and stumble over themselves in an effort to keep the bike upright, and he’s suddenly grateful that Betty will be cleaning the air filter out tomorrow morning. Although he can technically drive the old truck, he prefers the bike. Something about the feeling of the wind whipping past his jacket and the general badass-ery of a motorcycle is pleasing to him, and his dad’s old junker does not have the same graceful feeling as balancing over a bike. 

Riding a motorcycle filled Jughead with the same childish adrenaline of riding a bicycle with no hands, or of staring down a five-course meal with apprehension and hunger rolling through his stomach. 

It doesn’t take him long to get to Betty’s house, where cars crowd the street and Fred Andrews stands outside his door, watching Jughead skid into an empty spot of street and dismount with ease. Fred lifts his hand halfway above his head in a traditional wave. 

“Where’s Archie, Mr. Andrews?” Jughead asks as he kicks the stand down on the ground and unclips the helmet, shaking out his curly hair in front of his face. 

“Out,” Fred says vaguely. As if he knows what Jughead’s about to say, he adds, “Seemed a little shady to me when he left an hour ago, but whatever. He’s old. He’ll be fine.” Noticing Jughead’s only suit, he grins. “Betty invite you to the Midnight Dinner?”

Fred Andrews knows exactly how Jughead feels about Betty. He probably knew the truth before Jughead himself did. Sometimes it seems like Jughead’s feelings about the girl next door are exposed for God and everyone to see, but then he remembers that no one cares about him anyways, and the solemn thought gives him comfort in his embarrassment. 

Jughead grins back, unlacing his boots. “She invited your son first, but he blew her off.”

Fred winces good-naturedly. Archie was always a romantic disaster. This blatant invitation to a date probably flew right over his head. Jughead could hear Archie’s voice, echoing a response to Betty’s invitation – _I’m sorry, Betty, but I’m going out with Josie tonight, maybe next time_?

“Good luck, son,” Fred calls to Jughead, as he turns back towards his warm and blissfully empty house. For a half a second, he considers following Fred in and skipping the party across the way, but he cuts him off before he can even act on this impulsively bitter thought. “Go get ‘em. And by that, I mean go get Alice Cooper off her high horse. She tried to get me to trim my beard today.”

“She did _what_ now?” 

“Go, Jughead!”

He crosses the street, his feet stumbling over themselves in an effort to retreat to what he knows best – solemnity, comfort. Loneliness, he supposes.

But his mouth made a promise to Betty and then followed up that promise with additional questions about information and specific details about the nature of his promise, and despite everything negative and bad there is about Jughead’s character, he does like to keep his word. And so it is his promise and his words that lead him up to the colonial two-story, feeling the pit in his stomach knot around itself once more. 

He’s never officially been to one of Alice’s Midnight Dinners, but he’s been around after the fact to do damage control, lying with Betty in the backyard where she was supposed to be clearing the tables. These meetings occurred most often in the two-month period following Betty’s harrowing breakdown, when any new self-doubt could cause a relentless spiral. He met her in the backyard and lay with her, listening as she discussed the weight on her chest and watched his hands lazily trace the constellations in the sky.

“That one’s Taurus,” he explained once, pointing at the stars. 

“What’s it mean?”

“The bull,” he replied, grabbing her fingers and directing them to the right constellation. “Security, protection, the earth.”

He could practically hear Betty’s grin from beside him as she traced the stars. “I can’t believe you read horoscopes.”

“I do not,” he argued indignantly, but it was a half-hearted attempt. He relented. “I’m not a Taurus.”

“I can’t believe Forsythe Pendleton Jones the _fucking_ Third reads his horoscope. Oh my God, Jug, I’m going to cry.”

“I beg of you,” Jughead said, only half joking, turning his head to her, “let it go. _Please_. My reputation as the class depressed kid is at stake, Betty, please.”

She laughed, rolling away from him and sitting up. “Oh, no. I’m going to blackmail you with this for the rest of your sad life, Jones.” She was too far away from him for him to see, but he could tell that a little glimmer of hope after a horrible evening had made its way back into her eyes. 

Later, Alice would yell at Betty for staining her dress by lying in the grass, and she’d apologize for something she wasn’t really sorry about. Jughead’s fault, of course. Her white fabric, all green at the bottom, all his fault. He’s not eager to see Alice again. He and his “problematic” newspaper articles are trouble for Alice and her perfect little family. Come to think of it, Alice probably thinks that Jughead is the reason why Hal Cooper is locked up now. 

Rapping twice on the door, he braces himself for the worst, and finds himself met with a rush of wind and the overwhelming smell of tangerine. Before his eyes can focus, he knows it’s Betty. Though she usually smells of vanilla, the citrus scent of a tangerine is so similar to her that it is impossible for anyone else to smell of tangerine tonight.

 _Not_ that Jughead knows what she usually smells of. Or that he smells her. That would be horrifyingly creepy.

But he’s quick, and he’s accurate, and he notices things. The little bottle of vanilla scent she keeps in the _Blue and Gold_ is not hard to notice, and it is no more difficult to imagine Betty smelling of vanilla than it is to see the glass bottle at all.

“Jughead!” Betty says, and internally he thanks her for redirecting his thoughts. “Thank god, you’re here.”

“Is it so bad already?” he asks incredulously, shedding his riding coat and hanging it where he sees fit, which happens to be off a banister.

“It’s always bad,” she says as a response, turning sharply on the hardwood and disappearing around a corner. He ventures into the main hallway, ducking under a lofted champagne glass and following Betty’s shadow towards what he recognizes as the kitchen. 

The sound of people mingling is louder here in the kitchen. Betty weaves her way through respected adults from town (Jughead manages to nod nervously at Principal Wetherbee but avoids eye contact with anyone else) until she reaches the tray of what can only be described as tiny chicken sushi.

Jughead snorts and lowers his voice. “The fuck are those.”

“Ask me if I know,” Betty retorts under her breath, the timbre of her voice rumbling as it catches in her throat. “I’m just serving them.”

“Your mom makes you work at these things?” Although the idea of Betty playing waitress at Alice’s parties isn’t altogether ridiculous, it does seem a little eighties. For whatever reason, _Dirty Dancing_ pops into his head. _Nobody puts Baby in a corner_. 

He is immediately ashamed of himself. _God_ , isn’t he better than this?

“There is nothing Alice Cooper won’t do to me,” Betty says, raising an eyebrow. “Want to try one?”

He accepts the offering and bites down on the tiny delicacy. Immediately, the sensation of something being extraordinarily _wrong_ floods his mouth. Betty chuckles under her breath at the apparently hilarious look on his face. He hits her on the arm. 

“Steak,” he mutters, chewing a little more. “But… sushi-style. I think this is literally seaweed wrapped around it.”

“Gross,” Betty says appreciatively. She hands him a napkin.

Gratefully, he spits out the food and wraps it in the cloth. 

“So how is the she-devil today?” Jughead asks as a Betty fills the tray with a lighter, but less formal, delicacy (cheese and crackers.) She shakes her head.

“She’s normal. She’s always stressed about these stupid things, you know." Betty inhales sharply as she ducks around a crowd of adults, jostling the tray but avoiding a spillage. "So many fancy adults in her humble home. But the good part about the prep work for these dinners is that she’s always yelling at me about things that are her own fault, rather than my general existence or appearance.”

“Your existence is technically her fault too.”

She waves him off, wordlessly alerting him to the fact that she got his joke and that she was not amused by it. “How’s your dad?”

“Oh, god,” he mutters. “Anything but him, Betty, I promise I’ll answer.”

His dad, who he thought was doing better but was actually way worse. After living through the Black Hood fiasco and watching one of his best snake charmers desert their ranks for a higher bidder, FP Jones Junior hadn’t been feeling too well. Unfortunately, now he’s not feeling much of anything at all, through all of the alcohol he’s been going through.

He doesn’t really feel like going into detail about his tragic home life tonight. Maybe he would tell her tomorrow that his dad only came home after one AM, starving and smelling too strongly of beer for his repeated insistence that he was still sober. But not tonight.

A pair of salt-and-pepper adults whom Jughead vaguely recognize as Ethel Muggs’ parents accept some Swiss cheese and Triscuit crackers with a nod towards Betty as she continues to make her rounds. “Fine, then. How’s your sister?”

This question is no easier, and he represses the urge to groan at her. Jughead _wishes_ he could answer. He hasn’t seen JB in years and hasn’t talked to her in months, the last time being over text when he asked her _How’s life been treating you?_ and she responded with _Horrible, thanks for asking_.

He could lie to Betty and tell her that his sister was doing wonderfully and flourishing in Toledo. It would be too easy, with her focused on serving the guests and winding their way through the throngs of adults until they reached the sliding glass door. But he hates to lie to her. It feels immoral, after every raw truth she’s ever told him.

He answers truthfully, and Betty nods in understanding. “Has she called since the last time?”

She’s referring to the time JB called him while they were editing, about half a year ago. The answer is no. His sister is busy. He’s been busy. He’s been writing for the news, editing Betty’s fantastical stories, restricting the gossip column to the best of his ability. They haven’t had time to catch up properly.

“Does that make me a failure of a brother?” Jughead asks Betty as she presses the glass tray to the coffee table and leaves it for guests to converge on. She steps back with him into the shadows. Dimly, he can see her head shake.

“It just means you don’t talk to your sister,” she said.

As much as Jughead gripes about his logicality and accuracy and _realness_ , sometimes the truth of Betty’s words punches him in the gut where it hurts most. 

-

The dinner leaves him feeling winded, like he’s just run a five-mile race. (No, scratch that. After he’s just collapsed at the one-mile mark, too exhausted to continue.) Alice is angrily cleaning up plates, taking a few spare seconds to shoot Jughead death glares, while Betty smiles with chapped lips and ushers the guests out of the door.

“Shouldn’t you be leaving?”

Alice’s icy voice cuts through the uncomfortable tension like a knife. He wishes the knife might stab him in the heart, so that he didn’t have to look at her and wish he was dead. 

There are two options: one, he could leave through the bushes in the backyard, speed through town on his motorcycle, and cry for hours on his couch at how horrible his life currently is, or two, he could help Alice clear the dishes, save himself an argument with Betty, and increase his chance of a heart attack by over three hundred percent.

The two options weigh heavily on either shoulder. _There isn’t even a choice._ He stands and gathers the champagne glasses, listening to the way they clink against each other rather than focus on Alice’s heavy breathing. 

“So?” she asks, standing right in front of him as if she’d just appeared there. He blinks once. With her heels on, she’s at eye level with him, and if there’s one thing Jughead hates the most, it’s direct and prolonged eye contact.

He shifts his eyes to Betty, still ushering guests out of the door, and picks up a last champagne glass. “I’m helping you pick up the dishes, Mrs. Cooper. And then I promise I’ll get out of your hair.”

“Careful,” she says to him. “Jones boys are known to break valuable things.”

He doesn’t give her the satisfaction of a response, instead bringing in the glasses and setting them gently on the counter next to the sink. From his vantage point washing dishes, he can hear Betty handing coats to important adults and saying, “Thank you so much for coming – oh really, dinner was nothing – no, thank you! – oh, I’ll be sure to tell her that – yes, yes, okay, good night!”

The front door slams shut, and Alice leaves a stack of breakable china precariously close to the edge of the counter by the sink. Never in his life has he been in the presence of so much wealth, let alone touched so many expensive things at once. It’s extremely nerve-wracking to handle the fine china as he scrubs the steak sauce stains off of the floral plates as gently as possible. 

Alice’s heels click towards Betty by the front door. She doesn’t bother to keep her voice down.

“What. The _fuck_. Was that.”

“Mom, I –” 

“Elizabeth. I gave you the job of hosting and carrying platters around for years at these parties, and not once have you ever slipped up. I let you invite one friend, you invite this trash Jones boy, and then you ruin my whole night.” She takes a shallow breath. He can hear the liquor tracing its way along her syllables, rumbling through every word. “I should slap you, you know. You ruined my shot at becoming someone good. Someone important.”

“Mom,” Betty says, choking back a sob. “Mom, I swear, I –”

“I don’t want to hear it, Elizabeth, I really don’t.” There’s a dangerous pause. Jughead shuts off the tap and shakes out his soapy hands, hearing his wrists pop as the joints move back and forth. He tries not to listen to the Cooper women argue. 

Everything in his nature is non-confrontational. As a kid, he preferred to hide rather than to listen to his parents fight. 

“You brought this _boy_ to our house,” Alice says, and he knows her eyebrows are knit together with disgust. He can hear the emotion in her voice, crackling with raw anger and energy that could only be coming from the liquor.

He never liked serious arguing. He walked away from fights in the cafeteria and over Twitter. He never told any secrets or spread any lies.

“You made me look like a damn fool and charity case because he got to eat our food. Did you hear the Lodges complaining about how much of a troublemaker he is? Elizabeth, my reputation rests upon these dinners. My future. My redemption from marrying that _idiot_ Hal. Do you understand me?” 

Jughead never started fistfights. Never tried to intervene. Maybe that’s why he became a writer. To have an excuse to observe constantly.

She’s got Betty by the shoulders, shaking her like an Etch-A-Sketch. “Do you fucking understand me, Elizabeth? Do you know why I just want to protect you from people like _him_ now?”

There are tears leaking from Betty’s eyes. His head screams at him to stay put, rooting his feet into the ground. His hands want to hold her, smooth back her hair, let her know that none of what Alice is saying is true.

 _Why tonight?_ he thinks. _Why now do I suddenly have a side to take?_

“Are you kidding me, Mom?” Betty yanks herself out of Alice’s grasp, desperately wiping at her eyes. “The party was fine. No one made a big deal out of anything. Jughead didn’t even talk at dinner. What are you really mad about? Is this because I’m still friends with him?” Her lack of a response seems to confirm Betty’s question. She laughs languidly, choking back a bout of tears. “ _God_ , Mom, can you step aside from controlling my life for two whole seconds?”

Alice’s face contorts into something ugly. Something brutal. She slaps Betty hard across the face, the sound echoing for miles across open land. 

Silence.

_What is the word for this?_

This… game-changer. Plot twist. Perfidy. Shock. Moment of impact. Road to Damascus. This look of total betrayal that spreads across Betty’s face. Every sentence Alice has ever said to Betty rewrites itself to spell one word. _Abuse abuse abuse abuse._

Betty reaches her hand up to her face, a red mark now blooming like an ugly flower over her cheek. Her eyes soften in pain and harden in anger, all in the matter of milliseconds, but she does not break. Tears still streaming down her face, she stares down her mother, the hurt welling in her eyes and swallowing her tongue.

Alice sways on her feet from the kickback. Before she can look fully at the red mark, she spits in Betty’s face, “I wish you weren’t my daughter.” 

She turns on her heels and clicks away. Upstairs. The sound of a door slamming is heard and then there is nothing but Betty, standing alone and crying silently in front of the door.

Jughead strides quickly across the room to her, hesitating for only a fraction of a second before placing a hand on her shoulder. “Betty,” he murmurs, trying to sound comforting. He doesn’t know what she wants, whether she wants the embrace or just a friendly face, and he’s not sure if he’s comfortable initiating the embrace himself. 

Luckily, Betty knows exactly what she wants, and she steps forward into his chest, quietly sobbing. He wraps his arms around her shoulders and keeps her there. She goes completely still in his arms, still frozen from the impact of Alice the whirlwind. But she melts in seconds into his embrace, shaking with her sobs as Jughead holds her tight.

“None of that was your fault, okay?” he says quietly into her hair. “It’s not your fault your mother can’t control you and it’s not your fault that she fucking hit you.”

Betty takes a long time to respond. When she does, it’s with a “I deserved it. I was mouthing off to her and I shouldn’t have.”

“Hey,” he says, pulling back for a second. She does not let go of his shoulders, keeping her face buried underneath his chin.

He flushes to realize that she fits perfectly within his arms, and to hide the reddening of his cheeks, he buries his face in her hair and hugs her tighter.

For a moment that bleeds into minutes, they just stand there, right in front of the door to the house, holding on to each other. Jughead’s heart skips a few beats every now and again as he shifts his head and disrupts her hair from its neatly pinned-back braid, and then again as he moves his hands to smooth down the piece of hair. 

He wonders, as they stand, slowly rocking, how many people drive past these two-story homes every day. How many stories could be told about these women. How many times Betty had let this happen to her, or how many other Bettys there stood before her. How many desperate daughters and angry mothers had stood in this entryway and said things they would regret sober. 

How many bricks had fallen from the foundation of a family right here?

“She shouldn’t have slapped you,” he mutters a few minutes later as Betty’s sobs dissipate. “I’ll fucking _slaughter_ her. I’ll punch her right now, Betts. Just say the word.”

She laughs a little, a drunken sound over the tears still clogging her throat, and pulls back. “It’s okay, Jug,” she says, wiping at her eyes with her wrist. “I don’t need you to go to jail for me.”

He meets her eyes, and they’re a little glassy after crying, and the red bruise underneath her cheekbone is still blooming, but they’re still Betty’s eyes. There’s sincerity in her pleas. He nods, and she sighs, relieved. Her face settles into a mask of politeness.

“Should I grab your coat? You should probably go, it’s like two in the morning.” He can see her digging her fingernails into her palm, her tell betraying her for the umpteenth time. His hands grab hers and spread her fingers apart, a gentle reminder to stray away from all the bloodletting. 

He lets go of her hands, dropping them to his sides. “I’ll let myself out, okay? You go get some rest.”

She leans towards him. Just a little. Enough for him to think he might be imagining it. If this was _The Breakfast Club_ , she would have kissed him, and he would have kissed her back.

_What is wrong with him today? First he can’t write a sentence, and now he’s referencing eighties teen movies? Is he serious?_

But life is not an eighties teen movie, and so she does not move except to wipe an additional tear from her eye. “Okay,” she says, exhaling again. “I will.”

She tries to smile a little at him, but halfway there, her smile chokes and fades away. She turns her back to him, padding up her stairs in an effort not to wake her mother. Over her shoulder, almost as an afterthought, she calls, “Thank you, Jug.”

Jughead, taking his coat off of the banister, quirks up one side of his mouth as a response. “Let’s _not_ do this again, shall we?”

“Deal,” she laughs softly, and disappears upstairs.

He shuts the door to the Cooper home behind him equally softly, making his way down the sidewalk and past the gardens towards his bike, where everything was concrete and safe with no malice and no red bruises and no soft and certain girls who smelled like tangerines.

Nothing about the sound of his bike kicking itself to life is soft, and for once in his life, Jughead is glad to see the black smoke rise from the engine, curling around his head like cigarette ashes and disappearing into the black night without fanfare. The engine chokes twice before turning over, and he kicks the bike into gear, shoving off from Fred Andrews’ curb and surrounding him with the telltale black smoke of danger.

 _Finally_ , he thinks. _Finally something else to think about tonight._

-

A loud vibration shakes his bones awake from their uncomfortable position where he’s draped across his rickety couch, having luckily changed into sweatpants and an old _Kill Bill_ t-shirt before he crashed there last night. He’s not sure what he would have done if his only suit creased, or worse, got drool on the collar.

The sun is barely over the horizon as he glances at the time stamp on his phone, where the vibration came from: 6:56 AM. 

“Gross,” he moans, checking the notification. It’s a short message from Betty.

_When should I come to fix the bike?_

He wishes she had called instead. That way he could at least tell what kind of state she was in. if she’d slept at all, if she was in any condition to work on his bike today. He didn’t want to make her work if she wasn’t feeling well. But she had typed out a message instead, and all he manages to gather from the curt words was that she wasn’t feeling up to revealing how she felt. 

He taps out a response, managing to press send before flopping back down onto the sofa and pressing the pillow over his eyes to block out the sunlight.

_give me thirty minutes_

Had last night been a dream? He couldn’t remember clearly what had happened. A quiet dinner spent trying not to rub elbows with the Lodges (seated right next to him) and making a lot of annoyed eye contact with Betty (seated across from him.) Washing expensive dishes. Betty getting hit by her mother, hard, before collapsing into his arms. He’d ridden home with his groaning bike and heavy emotions and crashed almost immediately. 

He sort of hopes that last night _had_ been a dream. He doesn’t want to see the hand-shaped red bruise on her cheek.

Exactly twenty-nine minutes later, Jughead steps outside of the trailer and blinks a few times to clear his eyes. Betty is nothing if not punctual. Lo and behold, she’s sitting at the end of the stoop in a pair of old overalls and an oversized long-sleeve shirt to combat the chill in the air, toolbox at her feet. 

“Hey,” he says, clambering down the stairs until he’s in front of her. The mark on her face is bright red, contrasting the rest of her expression, which is nearly stark white. She’s not wearing anything to cover the bruise, nor is she wearing any makeup at all. Running his fingers through his loose hair, he asks, “Did you sleep at all last night?”

She shrugs. “A little, I think. Where is she?”

He walks her over to where he parks his bike – sort of behind the house, so that people from the street can’t see it or steal it. Here in this trailer park, run by the Serpents, FP is king. If they steal Jones shit, FP will always get it back. It’s an unspoken Serpent rule. But the road belongs to the world, and although his bike is old, he takes good care of it; the metal shines as if brand new. He doesn’t like to take the chance of someone stealing his bike because it was in plain sight of the main road. 

Betty circles the bike, patting around the engine. “Start ‘er up.”

He clambers on top of it, digging his keys out from his wallet and twisting them into the ignition. The engine roars, then sputters in protest. Right on cue, the cloud of black erupts from the pipes, and Betty waves her hands to dissipate it. “Okay, you’re good. You can shut it off now.”

Gratefully, he turns the keys backwards and steps off the bike, coughing. 

“Pretty sure it’s just your air filter, Jug,” she mumbles, crouching next to the tank. “Do you know where it is?”

Jughead raises an eyebrow and squats next to her. “I don’t know shit, Betty. That’s why you’re here.”

Snorting, she runs her hands along the side of the bike until they reach the tank. She slips her hand under the tank. “It’ll be easy to fix, but this isn’t going to be super simple, Jug. I’m going to need you to hand me my toolbox and the rag on it.”

Her hand emerges covered in grease, and she shakes it out, popping her wrist. “Jesus, when was the last time you cleaned under the bike?”

“Under the fuel tank? Like never.”

“Well, that’s why your air filter isn’t working, you idiot,” she says, wiping her hand against the dirty overalls. She takes the rag and the toolbox from him, snapping open the case and removing a fresh air filter and a screwdriver. “You have to clean the grease off, or else you’ll never keep your filter clean for very long.”

He’s watched Betty fix machines for years now, and he never fails to be amazed at how easy she makes it look. Her hands are capable of flight as she works through machinery, snapping cables and refilling liquids and cleaning filters. It’s entrancing to watch her work with the same kind of precision and accuracy that he uses when he’s typing on his old typewriter. Words that are never misspelled, typing at a breakneck pace, space and return.

As she focuses, the color begins to return to her face, offsetting the bruise a little bit, but Alice’s handiwork is still evident, etched across her thin eyebrows and dark eyes. Every time Jughead closes his eyes, he can hear the mark of skin on skin echoing in his mind, and his stomach drops.

He opens them to watch her fiddle with the tank cover, grateful for any distraction for what he had witnessed. She’s only using the one tool and her hands, and they fly through the process of unscrewing the cover to the tank, accumulating black grease faster than snow accumulates on a frozen lake.

“Your hands are required,” she says, looking back over her shoulder at him and blowing a loose strand of hair out of her eyes. 

He sits on the grass next to her, holding his cupped palms out for the screws. She dumps them into his hand and sits up on her knees to look inside the fuel tank. 

In a matter of minutes, she’s talked him through what she’s about to do twice, but he isn’t completely understanding her. The individual words she’s saying filter through his mind, but they can’t seem to make sense together. Grammar, he understands. Writing is easy for him. It comes naturally. But this has always been Betty’s forte, machines and understanding how they work. 

She laughs a little at the confused look on his face. “I can’t believe you ride this thing everywhere and you still don’t know how it works.”

“I do know how it works,” he argues, patting the rims. “I start the engine, it turns over, and I give it gas.”

Betty shakes her head at him, unsnapping a cable that she’d informed him was a hose that connected to a radiator. For all he knew, she could be destroying his bike by disconnecting the two. It occurs to him that he should probably watch Betty work on cars more often, not only because he loves to watch her work, but because he should probably know more about the vehicle he has a license to drive. 

“Spark plugs,” she sighs, shaking her head. “You forgot about the spark plugs. You’re not giving anything gas if you don’t have lit fuel.”

“Fine,” he amends as she drops two more screws in his hand. “The spark plugs strike and light the fuel. The engine turns. I give it gas.” She smiles a little, a splotch of grease dangerously close to her lips on her chin, before plunging up to the elbows in the tank, maneuvering around the fuel section until her fingers seem to latch on something. 

“Gotcha,” she mutters, pulling the screwdriver out from a pocket and digging back into the tank. 

“Hey,” he says, summoning the little courage that lives inside his lungs, before he exhales and it disappears into the wind forever. “Can we talk about last night?”

Her little grin of satisfaction disappears as she reddens. “What’s there to discuss, Jug?” she sighs, swiping a loose piece of hair out of her face with the bone of her wrist and smearing grease across her forehead. “My mother is a horrible person. End of story.”

He doesn’t respond. He knows she doesn’t want him to. The way he’s trying to gather the words to say to her reminds him of the feeling of trying to capture falling pieces of paper, like he’s jumping to catch one, but his fingers keep slipping around the words.

“How long?” he manages to choke out. 

“Since forever,” Betty says, the truth rolling off her words and filling the silence between them.

He does not speak. He dares to glance at her, but she’s pulling at the skin on her lips, focusing on replacing the filthy air filter in his bike with a clean one. And there’s blood on her lips and blood coating her teeth and blood in the air and blood in his face. 

“Why didn’t you say something?”

The click of the filter being replaced echoes his question. She waits as the screws return to the inside of his bike before pulling her greasy and bruised face out of the tank and shakes her head. Her ponytail punctuates the beat of the words that are tumbling out of her eyes. _I don’t know, I can’t tell, I’m scared._

But her lips do not part to form the syllables and she turns away, grasping the screws from his still-cupped hands and getting back to work. 

“Why not, Betty?” Jughead asks, feeling the heat in his stomach rise to his throat, his tell of frustration. “Why didn’t you just _tell_ me? Or Archie? Or Veronica, hell, _Ethel_? What were you so afraid of?”

“This! Jughead, I am perfectly fine.” She spins around on her heels so fast that he’s afraid she might fall backwards. “I am alive. I am eating! Alice isn’t so bad most of the time. So if you would stop fucking _pestering_ me about it, I might be okay.”

Her shallow breaths match the beats of his heart. They’d fought before, but never like this. Always over stupid things, like the font of the paper (Jughead preferred Arial, Betty Times New Roman) or whether or not to order a milkshake at Pop’s. But never about parents and _never_ about this.

Betty knew his story. Why he never told anyone about FP’s alcoholism and how his own mother abandoned him here in favor of a new life in a new city with her perfect little girl. They hardly talk about abusive parents and they never fight about it. To do so would be to cross some unspoken line between “just friends” and “best friends,” and both Jughead and Betty have other best friends. Jughead has Archie. Betty has Veronica.

But still, Jughead can’t help but feel a little betrayed, deep in the pits of his stomach, where his hidden feelings tugged and pushed to be released. After every truth they’d shared, she’d kept this one to herself. 

There’s a thud of Betty hitting the ground, sitting down hard, as her energy whirrs out of her in one grand exhale. He’s pissed, but it’s not really about her, is it? He briefly considers keeping his mouth shut. She’d just yelled at him and it was clear she was upset, but he knows Betty.

He might not be Veronica. He might not be her best friend. But he’ll be damned if he doesn’t know this girl, how her gears turn and how her cogs work inside her mind. He knows she functions best when she has some fraction of stability, and so he reaches out for her hand and takes it, placing their entwined hands on her knee. Wordlessly, his action forgives her, and the stranglehold that his stomach gripped around itself releases. 

“I’m sorry,” he says, rubbing his thumb across her palm. “I lost my head. I shouldn’t have asked you that.”

She shakes her head, ponytail weak. “No,” she says, tears in the back of her throat. “I’m sorry. You just wanted to help, and I yelled, and I’m a mess and I’m sorry.”

“You are not a mess,” Jughead tells her, reaching for her rag and offering it to her other hand. “You are dealing with some deep shit right now. It is okay to be upset, but I’m on your team, okay?” He reaches his other hand out to wipe the tears from her cheeks, smudging a grease stain across her prominent freckles. “ _We’re_ gonna be just fine, but what she did to you was not. And I’m sorry, but that’s non-negotiable.” 

After years of watching Social Services try to tackle his case, and then about a thousand others on some cop drama show that FP liked to watch when he was drunk, he knows that this is not okay. This point-blank, textbook abuse, and he knows it just as well as she does. 

She buries her head into her knees for a few seconds before squeezing his fingers and letting him go.

“Thanks,” she murmurs, wiping her cheeks and smudging even more grease across her face. “Your bike’s fixed. Should be all clean now.”

“We can take it to the Jubilee, if you want,” Jughead says, standing up and reaching inside his coat pocket for his beanie and keys. “Unless you want to drive back home to change.”

She shakes her head, reaching up to tighten her ponytail. “No point.” Digging inside her toolbox, she finds the other clean rag and wipes her face of sweat and grease. “Did I get it all off?”

“Kind of.” He laughs at the grease stains across her nose. “Let me do it.”

He scrubs at the grease on her face as she re-tucks her shirt into her overalls. _Her face is smooth_ , Jughead thinks. _And up close, she’s got these tiny little freckles…_

He clears his throat loudly and shoves the rag back into her hands, fighting back the blush that threatens to crawl across his neck and splotch onto his cheeks. “Now it’s all good.” 

“Shall we?” She gestures to the bike. 

He kicks up the stand, hands the battered helmet to her, and straddles it, turning the keys into the ignition. The engine roars to life – no sputtering, no groaning, no grease, no black cloud of smoke. He turns and grins widely at Betty, noticing the way her lips stretch just a little way in satisfaction but not enough to make the skin bleed. The helmet sits crookedly on her head as she fastens it under her neck and clambers onto the seat behind him.

“Do you know how it works, Jug?” she asks, wrapping her arms around his waist. Her laugh echoes softly into his ear. He smiles, grateful she can’t see the blush that’s _definitely_ spreading across his neck now.

“Turn the key,” he says. “Spark plugs strike, engine turns, I give it gas.”

“Close enough,” she says, and he kicks the bike into gear, tearing out of the trailer park with Betty’s hair whipping into his mouth and a considerable blush splotching across his cheeks that only cold air and time could remove. 

-

The bike skids into the grass, blonde hair whipping into Jughead’s eyes as he kicks the gears into park. Betty laughs. 

“That was the worst parking job you’ve ever pulled,” she says, swinging off his bike and unclipping the helmet from her head. Her cheeks are flushed from the cold, but the red bruise on her face is still visible. 

He turns the ignition and kicks the stand down, accepting the helmet from her and hanging it off the handlebar. “It’s hard to park when your hair is in my mouth, Betts.”

She grins at him, tightening her ponytail as a dark-haired figure races behind her and throws their arms around her shoulders. 

“How’s my favorite journalist doing, Nellie Bly?” Veronica’s sugar-sweet voice rings over the dead autumn air, coupled with just the right amount of bitterness in her arched eyebrows to make her facial expression uniquely Veronica Lodge. 

“Fine, V,” Betty laughs, turning around to face her. Veronica cups Betty’s cheeks in her hands, frowning when she sees the mark of Alice’s hand framed against her face. Betty whispers something to Veronica that Jughead can’t hear.

He unties his rucksack from the back of his bike and throws it over his shoulder as the girls split apart, Veronica plastering her winning smile back across her face and Betty rearranging her facial expression into some semblance of normal. 

“Archie’s here,” Veronica says, nodding at Jughead with the least amount of friendship possible in order for their relationship to still be considered a “friendship.” Veronica and Jughead tread on thin lines. The pair were constantly caught in a passive-aggressive battle regarding Mr. Lodge’s horrid treatment of his workers, which Veronica defended and Jughead protested against. But for Betty and Archie’s sake, the two of them had to at least “act like you get along a little, please?”

Jughead nods back at her, even quirking his lips up a little in her general direction. Today is the Jubilee, after all. It’s not every day that the vilest town on Earth turns seventy-six years old. He supposes he can afford to be nice to Veronica Lodge for one day out of nearly four hundred in a year. 

“Great,” Betty says, turning towards the festival. “Let’s go, then.”

Veronica takes her extended elbow and the girls wander into the congealment of people, maneuvering through murmuring couples and judgmental families, all muttering about their secrets and their surprises and _Oh God, what’s that on her face?_

Jughead walks a few paces behind Betty and Veronica, glaring at the man who points at Betty in plain sight. If nothing else today, he could at least be a solid point of contact for her. 

Archie’s red plume of hair and broad shoulders come into view in the distance. He’s waving at Jughead – or maybe Betty – from the kettle corn stand, woven into the trees, where he’s standing with his father and the McCoys. Josie stands next to Archie, grasping his hand but keeping her earbuds fully in her ears. 

Archie has always reminded Jughead of a golden retriever, happy to see anyone and loyal to a fault. In this manner, he jumps up when he sees the trio wandering towards him and envelops Veronica and Betty into a hug. From behind his shoulders, Josie sighs and turns up the volume on her headphones. Jughead lifts his hand in a half-wave to her. She nods cordially. He can hear the music from here. Aretha Franklin. 

The sweet and pungent scent of kettle corn overwhelms the air near the stand, and Jughead’s stomach grumbles in anticipation. By far the best part about the Jubilee is the food; year after year, the same sweets find themselves in the crisp autumn air, and their entrancing scents cause Jughead to empty his wallet for the taste of sugared bliss running down his throat.

“Hey, guys!” Archie says, reaching out and punching Jughead on the shoulder. His elephant-ear fantasy will have to wait until later. “Everything okay with the party, Betty?”

She nods and smiles at him. If he hasn’t noticed her hand-shaped bruise yet, he’s an idiot. A lovable idiot, and Jughead’s best friend, but an idiot nonetheless. “Everything was okay, Arch. How was your date?”

“Great! Here, Jug, I bought you some kettle corn.”

He accepts the overflowing bag of kettle corn shoved in his direction and throws three pieces into his mouth. Veronica side-eyes him.

“I didn’t eat breakfast,” he explains through a mouthful of kettle corn. Veronica rolls her eyes in disgust. 

“Too busy helping the mechanic fix your shit?” she asks him, popping her gum. Betty coughs a little too loudly for subtlety and elbows Veronica in the side. He can’t hear exactly what she mutters in Veronica’s ear, but it sounds something along the lines of _Play nice, V._

“Something like that,” he says, raising an eyebrow at her. Betty reaches across Veronica to grab a handful of his kettle corn. “Betty replaced my air filter.”

Veronica makes an appreciative sound stemming from somewhere in the back of her throat. “Well, she _is_ good with her hands,” she remarks offhandedly. Betty chokes on the handful of kettle corn she’s just shoved into her mouth and Jughead forces back a laugh, desperately praying to any god out there that his cheeks don’t flush. Veronica, the chaotic agent, simply quirks up one corner of her painted mouth and takes a swig from her water bottle.

“Ronnie,” Archie says, tugging on Veronica’s sleeve. “your mom’s up next.”

The makeshift maple stage near the edge of the river, where the crowds are gathering in preparation for Hermione Lodge’s statement, grows quiet, all excepting the gurgling sounds of the river. Familiar faces dot the area around the stage: Cheryl and her mother stand near the stage, engaged in a yelling fight with each other; Reggie Mantle gathers with the football team; Jughead’s father stands near a queue of Serpents, who are spread along the edges of the crowd; Josie McCoy and her mother, who disappeared somewhere in the middle of Veronica’s nudging and are now arguing; Kevin Keller and his father, standing by with the police force atop the stage; and the harsh lines of the Lodge couple, making their way to the top of the podium.

Hermione taps the microphone with one perfectly manicured nail. Veronica grins, gripping Betty’s hand with her matching acrylics. Betty tries to smile back, but her lips can’t unfurl around her teeth completely. Archie taps out a Tweet on his phone. Jughead shoves another handful of kettle corn into his mouth.

“Riverdale,” Hermione says into the mic, her voice ringing clear through the mist of the river. She opens her mouth to begin her speech. The air stills around the clearing as if all of Riverdale has just collectively taken a breath of anticipation.

A click and a bang echoes through the riverbank. In the silence that follows, Veronica’s perfect eyebrow arches up in confusion, Betty’s ponytail whips in the direction of the sound, Archie’s phone drops to the dead leaves, and Jughead’s mouth closes around a kernel of corn. 

_What is the word for this?_

Game-changer. Plot twist. Perfidy. Shock. Moment of impact. Road to Damascus.

Betrayal.

Hermione Lodge’s mouth fills up with red, red blood that curdles and drips onto the microphone. Milliseconds tick by as her hair sways in front of her face before the body of Riverdale’s mayor crumples and falls onto the floor of the stage in total silence.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I PROMISE I HAVE A REASON FOR MAKING THIS CHAPTER SO LONG AND I'M SORRY FOR IT
> 
> how about it? i'm about to sit down on my floor and plot the entire web of this murder mystery and the remaining 16 chapters i still have left to write
> 
> thank you for your lovely comments! they help me procrastinate on doing many things and i'm eternally grateful for it
> 
> as always, find me on wattpad, where i very rarely write: @ffairlyfloral  
> pin with me: @ffairlyfloral  
> or find me reading and crying over other very good bughead fics right here on ao3: @clumsyhearts


	4. nuances.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> act one, scene four - the faithful editor and depressing wordsmith bicker, but for real. kiss + make ups occur. with significantly less kissing and/or maybelline. end scene.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> my sincerest apologies for making you all wait so long on this one. :,)  
> suggested listening: _heartbroken (acoustic)_ \- fickle friends + amber run

_betty cooper._

The _Blue and Gold_ is ablaze with first drafts, the pounding of keys and the ruthless sputtering of the printer keeping the duo company as they wrote. The clock ticks nearer to nine o’clock – which is technically the school’s official curfew; Betty had been known to stay and write for hours, glancing up at the janitor with bloodshot eyes and a messy ponytail, relentlessly apologizing as she dashed out of the newsroom three hours too late to make her own curfew at home.

(Her mother had been out of town during that particular incident, and Hal had fallen asleep on the couch nursing his fifth beer hours earlier, so Betty had been off the hook. But it had scared her so much that she vowed never to stay past curfew again.)

Across the room, Jughead’s typewriter dings, and his hand drags the carriage to its resting place, clacking out a few more words before yanking the paper from the machine. She’d found the typewriter at an antique shop last December and immediately gifted it to him, ignoring his protests of _it’s too expensive_ and _Betty, you really shouldn’t have_. The fifty-dollar splurge – uncharacteristic of her – had been well worth seeing when she returned after winter break to find him typing out all of his first drafts on the machine. 

He uses his laptop to write for the _Blue and Gold_ , of course. For all the old typewriter’s charms, the internet had it beat in terms of collaborative newspaper articles. 

Betty finishes the sentence she’s on, spotting the clock hand ticking steadily towards eight forty-five, and shuts her laptop, glancing up at Jughead as he runs his hand through his unruly curls. Her ponytail had fallen apart hours ago, bangs hanging low around her cheekbones in a desperate attempt to be tied to the rest of her hair. 

“Some day,” he says. His fingers move from the back of his neck to work nimbly in collapsing the typewriter delicately, packing its components back into its traveling case. As much as he groans about not understanding a wink of what Betty can do with cars, his hands would work deftly with the engines if he only bothered to learn.

If she had more guts, she might tell him as much. But they were still recovering from Veronica’s comment about Betty’s own hands working well, and she wasn’t quite sure she was ready to bring up the subject again. 

Although she thinks she does want to see that splotchy blush crawl across his cheeks again.

 _God_ , she’s tired. 

“Poor Veronica,” Betty mumbles, blowing a stubborn strand out of her eyes as she stands from the horribly uncomfortable chair she subjects herself to and stretches. The joints in her knuckles pop. Jughead flinches across the room. He hates the sound.

He mutters in some sort of agreement, clicking the snaps on the typewriter case in rapid succession. She turns her back to pack up the rest of her things – binders and textbooks and the dog-eared copy of Agatha Christie’s _They Do it with Mirrors_ that she’s rereading, for sentiment’s sake – and shoulders her coat. By the time she’s gathered her school materials back into her backpack, Jughead is standing in his riding coat by the door, waiting for her idly. His physics homework, which he’s now spent the better half of the day working on, is still unfinished and now crumpled around the edges. They’re studying the law of thermodynamics in class, and neither Betty nor Jughead understand the subject matter. 

No one in their class is making much of an effort to truly understand the topic, either, largely letting their teacher ramble about the specific mechanics of a cold body in contact with a warm one while they unpacked the murder of Hermione Lodge amongst each other.

Veronica hasn’t been at school since last Friday, and she hasn’t returned any of Betty’s copious and reassuring messages thus far. This is understandable. Her mother had just been murdered and she was rushed off the scene fairly shortly after the scene of the crime by her father’s capos, in hysterics and clinging desperately to Betty’s hands as she desperately tried to comfort Veronica.

 _Some day is right_ , she thinks. Some _weekend_ it had been.

As Betty joins him at the door and shuts the overhead lights off, he nods at the book clutched in her hands. “Trying to work around our case by studying the classics?”

“No,” she says, clicking out the lights as they step out of the tiny office. The janitor waves to the pair from the end of the hallway, and she offers him a tired wave back, Jughead nodding curtly in response. “This is for sentimental purposes.”

He furrows his brow. “I suppose _Cards on the Table_ is more fitting to the situation anyways.”

“Because Hermione Lodge reminds you of Shaitana?”

“No, because Shaitana got murdered in front of everyone.”

“Ah,” she murmurs. 

He glances down at her, hesitating before placing his rough hand on her shoulder. (His fingers are cold, even through the fabric of her shirt. He jokes sometimes that he’s perpetually cold because of the coldness in his heart, to which Betty lays her fingers on top of his and squeezes, promising she’s got more than enough warmth in her heart to go around.)

She sighs, already afraid of what he’s going to say. She prays it’s not about Alice, or the ugly purple bruise on her cheek that she’s covered today with a heavy layer of foundation. 

Thankfully, Jughead knows how little she wants to talk about anything that happened on Friday night, and leaves his hand on her shoulder as a comforting weight before simply saying “You doing okay?”

Her breath catches on the inhale. Her ponytail loose around her ears as she shakes her head out of its fog, she shrugs in response. Jughead’s fingers trace circles above her collarbone for a few seconds before he seems to realize what exactly he’s doing. With the barest hint of a flush spreading across his neck, his hand drops quickly to his side. 

“Just tired, I think,” Betty returns, opting to ignore the flicker of butterflies that tickle the edge of her stomach. (It means nothing, anyways. She’s just tired. She’s sure.) “I’m scared for Veronica and I’m worried we’re not helping her enough.”

“Isn’t this helping?” he asks, pushing open the front door. The rush of brisk autumn air that hits her face is a cold relief from the stuffy indoors that she’s been in for twelve hours. “Covering the case, reporting on the facts before someone can spread misinformation?”

It’s what she’s been telling herself all day – that it is helping her best friend cope with the loss of her mother – but as the hours ticked by, she found herself less and less convinced. “I don’t know, Jughead, I feel like we should _be_ there for her,” she sighs, digging her keys from her pocket. “But I don’t really know how, you know?”

He doesn’t say anything, his eyes locked onto hers as he considered what to say next. 

“When the Black Hood attacked, it was almost easier,” she says, glancing up at him as she forms her thoughts. “Other than dealing with a hormonal Archie and Fred’s life being put in danger, we didn’t really _know_ the victims or their families. I mean, it's a small town. We knew them. But Veronica –”

She gulps back the air that catches in her throat. “Veronica’s my best friend. And, I don’t know, but I feel like I’m not being there for her like she wants me to.” Betty yanks at the strap of her school bag. “Like she _needs_ me to.”

Jughead blinks down at her. His face is framed with the halo of the school lights in the parking lot as she taps twice on the key fob to unlock her junker car. It looks like the photos he likes to take, framing the faces of his subjects with light and casting everything else into shadow. _Because the person is what makes the photo, not the other way around, Betty,_ he’d told her once as he sat backwards in his chair, editing his shots in the _Blue and Gold_ before class. 

_Ethereal is the word you’re looking for_ , she’d teased him. _You made Toni look like an angel_.

He’d grinned up at her. _Toni_ is _an angel, Betts. That pink hair never fades. The mark of a true immortal._

He’s shaking his head at her now, cutting the light from the flood lights into pieces. “Veronica’s been ignoring your calls all day, Betty,” he says slowly, voice trailing into the air. “You called her once every thirty minutes. Texted her even more often. This is not your fault for not being there. You can’t be there for her if she doesn’t _let_ you.”

“But is this what she _wants_?” Betty snaps back, digging her nails into the strap of her school bag. “I’m her best friend. Shouldn’t I be, I don’t know, forcing myself into her room and making sure she’s really okay?”

“No,” Jughead says. “You shouldn’t. Give her space to grieve. When she needs to be comforted, she’ll return a call or something. Please, for the love of boundaries, do _not_ assume she’s a wreck and bust into her personal space when all she needs right now is for people to respect her wishes.”

“ _Veronica_ , Jughead! This is Veronica we’re talking about. Not you.”

He laughs, lips curving upwards the wrong way. Bitterness traces its way into his voice. “No, not me, Betty. But I’m pretty sure Veronica would have returned something from you by now if she needed you to comfort her. _Think_ for a second. When is she not on her phone? If she’s seen your texts, it means she doesn’t need you right now.”

“You’re still assuming she’s just like you,” Betty says. She purses her lips in anger. “She’s nothing like you. She grieves differently.”

“How do you _know_ how she grieves?”

“ _Dammit_ , Jughead, I’m pretty sure I know my best friend!”

“Listen, Betts. Listen to me!” He grabs her by the hands, spreading her fingers apart with force he usually reserves for writing angry articles or hitting the punching bag with her during stressful exam weeks. “When I’m grieving, I cut myself off. I don’t answer to texts. I _want_ people to respect my privacy, but I _need_ them to come and get me off my couch and force their way into my life. I think Veronica’s the opposite. I think she wants people to be there for her, but she needs to weigh things in her head. Alone. Without anyone asking hard questions or forcing her to look presentable. If someone is there with her, it means they have expectations of her, and I think she needs to be free of those to grieve for at least one day. And that means _no one_ should bother her.”

“But that’s my job, Jughead! I’m her best friend!” she shouts. “ _Best friend!_ I know _you_ might not know what that means, but _I’m_ damn sure it means loyalty despite all odds!”

Her breath catches on the last syllable as the meaning of the words tumbles hard out of her mouth. 

_Jesus, did she just tell Jughead that he didn’t know how to be loyal to his best friend?_

His brows crease in anger, Adam’s apple bobbing.

_Yes, she did._

She can see the anger crawl through his neck up to his face, where his expression contorts from something resembling reason to the way he looked homecoming night, sophomore year. His fingers throw her hands down to her sides again. “That’s cold, Betty,” he spits. “Maybe _you’re_ the one who doesn’t know loyalty, ever consider that? You, who expects people to do everything for you and who does nothing in return.”

“Jughead, wait,” she gasps. “That’s not what I meant. I don’t _know_ what I meant. I’m tired, okay?”

“Yeah,” he says, tilting his head to the side and pressing his lips together in his telltale angry smile. “That’s not going to cut it, Betts.”

“Jug, please,” Betty begs, reaching out for his hands as he steps away from her. He shakes his head slowly at her and pulls them away. “ _Please._ I’m sorry. That is not what I meant to say."

He turns sharply on his heel, shirttails fluttering in the air behind him. “Next time you need someone to come with you,” he spits, loud enough for her to hear even when she’s not facing him, “on some errand for your mother or to write you an article, don’t ask _me_. Evidently, _I’m_ not loyal enough to fucking _show up._ ” 

Jughead stalks away from her, posture stick-straight for once in his life, leaving Betty to catch her panicked breath in the school parking lot, officially ten minutes too late to make her curfew.

-

Perhaps their disastrous fight wouldn’t have been so awkward, Betty thinks as she drives herself home, fingers twitching aggravatedly on the wheel, if they hadn’t been stuck at school previously for five hours in the same room, going over the facts of the case again and again. Add on the facts that they still had an unfinished article to write together that they’d been bickering about all day, a pending request for the autopsy report from Dr. Curdle Jr., and that the two of them had been at each other’s throats constantly about serious subjects lately. Their collective grudge from this spat might last them a year long, if they were lucky. If the two of them held onto their grudges for longer (as was typical of the two of them), it might be graduation before she manages to speak with him on a personal note again. 

The turn off of Main Street is a bit harsher than Betty wants it to be, due to her mental state and the stress of writing a news article that might _matter_ in the grand scheme of things outside of college scholarships and praise from her mother, and her shitty car reacts accordingly, tipping slightly to the right. She slams her shoulder into the left door, evening the weight in the car until the car straightens itself out on her neighborhood road. 

Her heart chokes and sputters like her engine, but the wheels are on the road in milliseconds, and her brain helpfully decides to supply the sound of Jughead’s belly laugh echoing around her empty car into the silence. As if she didn’t already have reason enough to feel bad about their argument, the memory of her car attempting to kill her and Jughead for the first time violently resurfaces, and she finds herself lost in it as she continues on her neighborhood road.

She was driving him home one afternoon this summer after one of Archie’s gigs in a coffee shop, Jughead talking her ear off about his latest chapter that he’d wrote in a one AM Monster-induced fervor, when she’d made the right turn off of Main Street towards the South Side a little too sharply. Her terrible car, being imbalanced and old, tilted to the right. 

In the span of two seconds, Jughead’s shoulder slammed hard into the passenger door, and Betty yelped and jerked her entire body to the left instinctually. The car managed to straighten itself out from some pure miracle, but Betty had been so freaked out that she immediately pulled over onto the side of the road and laid her head down on the wheel. 

For a second after she yanked the lever into park, the entire car was silent. She wasn’t even sure if Jughead was _breathing_. But as soon as the thought crossed her mind, Jughead burst out into huge peals of laughter. 

She glanced up from the wheel at him as he shook with laughter. She had, quite literally, never seen him laugh like this in his life. It was a fit of laughter bad enough that he took his hat off and threw it at her. 

“Betty!” he shouted, lips split in a grin wide enough to light up a whole city. 

And suddenly, she started laughing too, taking her foot off the brake and tugging her fingers through her loose hair. The situation was altogether so idiotic and life-threatening that the two of them were utterly gone, laughing in Betty’s car for at least five minutes, before Jughead finally pulled himself together and picked up his hat. 

“I can’t believe you almost _killed_ me and we would have died in such a shitty accident as turning too sharply off Main Street in _Nowheresville_ , Betts,” he said.

“Stop,” she moaned. “I don’t wanna hear it from you, Jug.”

He whacked her on the thigh with his hat, grinning widely. “Highlight of my summer vacation.”

Her fingers twitch endlessly on the wheel as the rumbling of a car idling on a hill shakes her from the memory. She yanks the lever into park, sitting silently in the car for an extra gulp of air before clambering out of the door and carting her bag into the darkened house. Her brain, either from exhaustion or adrenaline or pure terror, fries itself with electric charges over and over again, Jughead’s genuine laughter echoing through her head as she treads upstairs and flops on her bed. 

She must spend five minutes just lying silently in her room, letting the emotions overcome her and the tears run down her cheeks. Emptiness is what she feels the most when she’s drained, and the void inside of her threatens to consume her like an imploding building, everything crumbling around her center slowly, then all at once.

Betty’s _hungry_ , she realizes with a start. That may be the first of her problems. She hasn’t eaten since lunch, when the peanut butter and jelly sandwich she inhaled stuck fast to her mouth. Archie had laughed at her as she worked the peanut butter from the roof of her mouth, prompting Jughead to glance up from his physics homework and grin his lopsided grin at her as she pushed the brown stuff solidly down her throat. Now her stomach is past the point of growling at her angrily, settling instead for tearing pains in her abdomen. 

Traipsing back downstairs, she tugs at her ponytail until it falls out of its holder. The cool of the refrigerator door sets her senses back to normal, her eyes perking up at the edges and nose turning back upwards, as she snags two apples from the produce drawer and a box of Cheez-Its from atop the refrigerator. 

Her mother must not be home tonight, which is good, because Betty can’t think about dealing with her right now. They’d been avoiding each other in a careful sort of dance for the past few days. Since Alice had struck Betty across the face and left an uncomfortably red mark, she didn’t seem to be able to look her daughter in the eyes. And Betty had found more than one empty liquor bottle in the trash can in the mornings. 

She isn’t complaining. Not yet, anyways. If Alice isn’t yelling at her about her waistline, Betty considers it a victory. 

Soon, she fears, she’d be eating her words. If FP Jones in Betty’s sophomore year was any kind of domestic horror story, she didn’t want to let her mother even _think_ about ingesting more alcohol than she could handle. But Alice had always been violent-tempered, even sober. Never carrying out the threats, but making them nonetheless. 

Really, Betty figures, the time-bomb on her and her mother’s relationship had been ticking to explode into physicality long before her mother had slapped her Friday night.  
It still didn’t mean it hurt any less, though.

As she retreats upstairs, apple in each fist, the anxiety that had settled itself over her head in waves over the course of the school day dissipates. It’s easier to think in a quiet house with the hum of her laptop charging and the sensation of food satisfying her hunger pangs. 

She settles on her bed, legs crossed, and pulls her phone out of the pocket of her bag, unlocking the screen to read one text from Archie – _Heard anything from Ronnie?_ – and four college emails.

_Elizabeth, we want you._

Perhaps it’s Archie’s name on-screen, combined with the subject line of the emails, that confuses her. Perhaps she’s just tired. But she finds herself blinking away the tears suddenly threatening to crawl out of her eyes, knowing that never in a million years would Archie say her full name to her without some sort of a joke implied. _Elizabeth, fetch me the hose, please?_ he’d laugh, before spraying her with the water and laughing as she attempted to fend off the stream of water before she got soaking wet.

 _Elizabeth, we want you._

Reading the subject line again, she laughs a little, a drunken sound emerging from the back of her throat. Never in a million years did she want someone to say those words to her. _Elizabeth_ was too much too soon, too much of a reminder of her mother for her to ever imagine a boy saying those words aloud to her. 

As she swipes to delete the emails from her meticulously neat mailbox, she swipes at her eyes, too. _Jesus, she really is a mess tonight, isn’t she?_

Fingers hovering over the curt response to Archie for a second too long – _No. Sorry._ – she taps send despite her better judgement. She’s a little too tired with the day to worry about offending Archie now, although typically her brain would chew her out for the bluntness of the response. 

Her fingers also hover over Jughead’s contact, the last text interchange between them being at 9:34 AM – Jughead, saying _i finally finished linking everything in the first paragraph it’s so fucking annoying how do you deal_ and Betty, responding with _Oh, thank you! And it’s not so bad in HTML. Links are pretty simple. :)_

She does, truly, regret what she spat at him earlier in the parking lot, but isn’t sure how best to apologize – a phone call? A well-worded text? Her accusations were uncalled for, and he deserves a thousand apologies for what she said, but she’s still not sure of where they tread along the line of arguments and apologies. She’s seen him go days without talking to Archie after one of their spats. 

Now that Betty sits down and thinks about it, almost everything about her and Jughead’s friendship was uncharted territory – where they stood on talking about romance, politics, indie cinema, and insults was all new ground that she’d spent the last two years being unsure of how to tread upon. Middle school was simple, where Jughead could watch her work on cars with her dad and ask her about the math homework and Betty could work on her science fair project with Archie on the floor of Jughead’s trailer while he sketched out the comic for the newspaper funnies. But their relationship, although she’s hesitant to use the word, blossomed more in high school, fleshing itself out to a fully-fledged friendship. Which was wonderful and enlightening and made Betty realize just how desperate she’d been for an actual conversation that made her think longer than two seconds, but that also didn’t come without its qualms. Such as, how were they supposed to approach the delicate subject of which girl Archie was fucking this week without making it seem like they were into each other? And how was Betty to say that Jughead had been wearing the same shirt for three days now and that she was _worried_ about him? 

Ah, first world problems.

Deciding that nothing could possibly make this night worse than it already had been, she takes the last bite of the first apple and calls Jughead. She doesn’t use his contact card, programmed with his phone, email, and a photo of him reprimanding her loudly at one of Archie’s gigs this summer – she has five people’s phone numbers memorized, and his is one of them.

He picks up, surprisingly, on the fourth ring. Only one away from when he usually picks up. She can hear him chewing through the phone.

“Hi, Jughead,” she says, combing her hand through her loose hair. He swallows uncomfortably on the other end of the line.

“Hey, Betty,” he replies coolly. “Did Dr. Curdle call?”

“No. I wanted to talk to you. About earlier, in the parking lot.”

She hears him, through the phone, get up from the table, open the door to his trailer, and step outside, where it’s still barely warm enough for cicadas to sing, but cold enough so that she can hear the harshness of his breathing increase. 

“Okay,” he says, voice still carrying remnants of bitter. “Talk to me.”

The words spill out of her mouth in the form of a story. The afternoon she’d driven him home from Archie’s gig, the unfinished article, the law of thermodynamics, the apple sitting in her hand. How fucking terrible she felt. How she hadn’t meant what she’d said at all – _Because, Jug, how many days have you been there for me? How many times have you shown up when you didn’t need to?_ – and how she understood if he was mad at her until the end of time. By the time she’s finished talking, she’s fully lying on her back on her bed, aware that if she closed her eyes now, she might not wake up until morning. 

For a couple of seconds after she takes her last breath, he’s silent on the other end, his breathing being the only thing accompanying her in the total stillness of her house. The subtle tickle of the butterflies on the edges of her stomach jolts her eyes awake. Because _no_ , Jughead is not here with her, breathing beside her like it’s natural. He is in his own house, in his own world. 

Tonight, she chalks up the perpetual butterflies to her own exhaustion and keeps her eyes open as Jughead begins to speak. 

“Betty,” he sighs, clicking his tongue in one of his thinking tics, “I am angry, at what you said. Because it was rude. And I know I’m no Veronica Lodge, but I’d like to think I’m a little better than what you drew me as tonight.”

She nods, and she knows Jughead knows she nodded. She can hear the pause in his breath.

“But I know you’re tired and I know this is hard on you. It’s hard on all of us. I’m not really mad at you, Betts. I know you.”

Her breath catches on the inhale before her brain processes the last three words correctly, and then her ribs contract to let her breathe again. 

“I’m sorry, Jug,” she says again. She’s about to add onto it before her phone vibrates violently in her hands. “Wait, hold that thought. I’m putting you on speaker.”

“Is it Curdle?” he asks, shifting so that he can head back indoors. The article is already booted up on her computer, as she’s sure it is on his. 

“Yeah,” she breathes halfheartedly, skimming the message he’d texted her. The case file. At the end, printed as an afterthought, are the words: Mail me the bills and we’ll call it even. “Yeah! The file!"

His fingers are already slamming on keys, and seconds later, his green cursor appears on the document. “Well, don’t leave me hanging, Betts,” he laughs, as she’s midway through skimming the file a second time.

“Oh, shit, sorry.”

A few keystrokes later, the file is published onto the document. Betty sets down her phone so that she can continue to talk to him and tears open the box of Cheez-Its, crossing her legs and sinking a few inches into mattress.

The energy on the document is nearly tangible as the two of them work their way through the nuances of the autopsy report. Something inside Betty clicks. 

Despite everything about the situation – about Hermione Lodge’s horrifying murder, and their heated fights lately, and the late-night phone calls over dull school newspaper articles about serial killers – something about _this_ , this interaction, this relationship, feels so _right_ that she dares call herself content. 

-

_Mayor of Riverdale is shot in horrific homicide, town plays witness – J. Jones and B. Cooper._

_Published._

_This small town can’t seem to catch a break. One year and a few months ago, the town of Riverdale played host to a dastardly murder plot, involving the killing of Jason Blossom by his father, Clifford Blossom. The senior Blossom committed suicide in his family’s barn shortly after the evidence of his murder was made public, allowing his maple syrup company (and its rumored subsequent drug business) to fall into the hands of his wife Penelope. The following winter, a series of homicides occurred in the town that were committed by self-declared madman Hal Cooper, alias “Black Hood”. These series of murders shook the town greatly._

_As the town continues to recover, tragedy strikes once more at the seventy-sixth anniversary of the town’s founding, called the Jubilee by town members. The mayor of Riverdale, Hermione Lodge, was fatally shot at this weekend’s gathering, just before her prepared speech took place and in the presence of what essentially consisted of the entire town population, as well as a few highly trained police officials and first responders who were unfortunately unable to resuscitate the mayor after the fatal shot to her heart, which is thought to have killed her instantly._

_Neither the mayor’s husband, Hiram Lodge, nor her daughter, Veronica, were able to comment about the mayor’s death. The Lodges have long been involved in criminal schemes and are thought to have been involved with the closing of Southside High near the end of the 2016-2017 school year, among other instances of gentrification, since their relocation to Riverdale in 2017, although comprehensive evidence proving these links has yet to be proved. (Read the opinion J. Jones wrote about the injustice of closing Southside High here, or read the opinion B. Cooper wrote about the link between Lodge Industries and Riverdale here.)_

_The town is currently in a period of mourning for their mayor, who will be temporarily replaced by her husband, Hiram Lodge, until an emergency election can be held. This will be the second emergency election of this year. An emergency autopsy, performed by Dr. Curdle, reveals that Mayor Lodge probably died immediately following the shot to her heart, and the angle of bullet entry indicates that the shooter was probably located between the trees along the outskirts of the river, some hundred feet north of the stage. However, as nearly the entire town was present at the Jubilee, the murderer could have been any number of individuals, and the sheriff’s department will have their hands full handling suspects and alibis from the event, as well as nearly two thousand eyewitness reports._

_The sheriff of the town, Michael Minetta, was unavailable for questioning on whether he thinks the death of Riverdale’s mayor was a careless homicide or a well-planned murder, but knowing the dark history of this town, it’s likely to be the latter._

_This is a developing story and will be updated further as more information is made public._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> first, thank you so much for keeping up with me! i know i'm an idiot but this chapter kicked my ass into the twilight zone and then some. life is hard. <3
> 
> thank you for your lovely comments they make me want to drop out of school and write full-time
> 
> an update might come soon. perhaps not. time works in mysterious ways. who knows.
> 
> as always, i write (way less frequently) on wattpad: @ffairlyfloral  
> i'm on pinterest (way more frequently): @ffairlyfloral  
> or u can find me right here on ao3 reading other lovely bughead fics: @clumsyhearts


	5. messages.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> act one, scene five - the depressing wordsmith sees a movie with the red-haired retriever and is forced to confront his feelings about the faithful editor. family drama ensues and a road trip is planned. end of act one.

_jughead jones._

Something about movie theaters fascinates him.

It’s probably the entrancing smell of the popcorn, buttered to perfection, mixing with sweat and perfume and salty tears of moviegoers. His olfactory sense is his pride, cultivated through years of distinguishing from scent alone whether FP had brought home Wendy’s, Pop’s, or McDonald’s. Thus, his love of going to the movies probably stems from his love of food, which is only enhanced by his nose. Plus, going to the movies is cheaper than going to a festival or a concert, and no one could judge him on how much popcorn he is capable of consuming. 

Although he might have gone to see the movie on his own accord, Jughead finds himself outside of the Bijou Theater on the Thursday afternoon before fall break officially begins the next morning, leaning against the concrete pillars with a book in his hands and two tickets shoved into a jacket, waiting, as usual, for Archie. He’d mentioned that he needed to take care of some business before he came today. By Archie standards, this probably meant that the Archie and Josie ship had just ground to a halt, and Archie was about to jump overboard into another liner. 

Every time Archie broke up with a girl, he immediately began to fancy himself fascinated by another one, which was annoying at the best of times and downright disgusting at others. At one point, after Archie had left Val and immediately started flirting with Melody – breaking any and all girl and band codes of the known universe – Jughead began to wonder if the man had any sense at all or if that had disappeared years ago with his boyhood.

As thickheaded as Archie is, however, he is still Jughead’s best and probably only male friend, and he finds it difficult to say no to the movies if Archie dangles the string of unlimited popcorn over his head.

He is a simple man. If food is involved, he’ll carve out time from his misery and scholarship hunting to eat. 

Jughead keeps his head buried in _Miami Purity_ , which Betty had finished last week and immediately pressed into his hands, begging for someone to talk to about the ending. He’s not far in the story yet. It doesn’t seem obsession-worthy, but he and Betty do have different standards. 

“Okay, don’t hate me,” she’d said a few months ago as she poured him a mug of coffee from behind the counter at Pop’s, “but _In Cold Blood_ is not the best Truman Capote work.”

“What?” he laughed, taking the coffee from her. “Are you fucking with me, or are you serious?”

“I’m serious,” she said, looking him dead in the eyes. “ _Other Voices, Other Rooms_ is his most underrated one. How could you not be fascinated? A story of acceptance, love, terrible parents…it’s got the whole nine yards.”

“Okay, you’re fucking with me.”

“I am not!”

“Are you telling me that when I mention Truman Capote –”

“– which happens frequently –” 

“– your mind goes to his debut novel that he wrote while he was still friends with _Harper Lee_?” He gestured to her with his fork, a piece of cheesecake hanging off of it.

“How _dare_ you refer to Harper Lee in that tone?”

“How are we _friends_?” He elected to ignore her Harper Lee jab. (He actually didn’t mind Lee as an author herself. But Capote’s works while he was friends with her… _Christ_ , Betty had lost her mind, Jughead was sure.) “I’m going to leave. I’m never buying another cup of coffee from you again, Betty. _No_! You’ve lost first-name basis with me. You’re just Cooper to me now.”

“ _No_ , Juggie,” she groaned good-naturedly. “You’ve been here every day since the summer began and you _only_ buy from me. No one else knows how dark to make the coffee! No one else knows my secret ingredient!”

He grinned at her and shoveled the last bite of cake in his mouth. “Take it back, and I’ll reconsider.” A beat. “Wait. Your secret ingredient?”

“Shit,” she muttered, leaning over the counter with one tooth snagging her lower lip as she collects his plate and now-empty coffee mug. “I’ve spent the last year secretly putting a pinch of sugar in every cup of coffee you’ve ordered thus far. Kill me now, Jughead Jones.” She raises her hands, full of plates, in mock surrender. “I have confessed my sole sin.”

He’d punched her on the arm once she’d washed his plates in the back, but as he made a cup of coffee the next morning in his trailer, he found he’d quite accumulated himself to the subtle sweetness in his coffee. 

“Hey, man.” Archie’s boisterous voice shakes Jughead from the memory, and he slams the book shut. He doesn’t look happy, but he doesn’t look upset, either. Although Jughead found himself never truly able to tell with Archie.

“Dude!” Jughead laughs, as he slips the book into his jacket. “You’re late for your own movie date. What happened?”

Archie grabs his proffered ticket and pushes open the double doors to the Bijou. “Breaking up with Josie took much longer than I thought. Not that _she_ made it longer, it was definitely totally me. She actually seemed pretty okay with the breakup, now that I’m really thinking about it. But I’m here now. And we didn’t miss too many of the previews, right?”

“Wow,” Jughead says, digesting this information in bits as it filtered through his mind. He’d thought he’d been prepared to listen to Archie gripe for two hours while he tried to watch the movie, but evidently, he had not spent enough time in a secluded headspace to fully prepare. “How…did you make it longer?”

“Oh,” Archie says, tugging on the hair near the nape of his neck. “Well, we were on a date, you see, and…”

“Oh my god,” he muttered. “Do _not_ go on. I’ve decided I do not want to know.”

Archie obliges as the pair join the concessions line. In the matter of thirty seconds, he’s begun talking again, about the very first date he ever went on with Josie. Usually, Jughead at least pretends to listen. He loves Archie, and wants to listen to his stories, but he absolutely despises hearing a breakup story. Somehow, each new one gets worse than the last.

He’s saved by the repeated vibration of his phone in his back pocket, the rare but sure sign that someone was calling him. He prays it’s not a junk call. Archie could handle the popcorn and his breakup on his own for two minutes.

“I have to take this,” Jughead says, checking the caller ID. 

_Gladys Jones._

“Oh, man, I _really_ have to take this,” he mutters, and backs away from the line. “I’ll meet you in the theater, yeah?”

“Okay, dude,” Archie says. “I’ll grab some popcorn. Want anything else?”

He shakes his head as he picks up the call, pressing his phone to his ear as he stalks back towards the doors. 

“Mom?”

“Oh, Jughead, baby!” she cries, voice just as rough and low as Jughead remembers it. “How’s my baby boy doing, huh? How’s my baby?”

He’s shocked enough that Gladys called. She never reaches out to make contact with him or his father, not since she up and left the two of them. And it’s a bit worrying that he’s suddenly her _baby boy_ , as he’d never heard anything but gruff praise leave her lips. But mostly, it’s her timing that truly ticks him. Of all the weeks, she calls _now_? Right after Hermione Lodge gets shot?

It’s always possible that this is a happy coincidence, of course. She could have called today because she really missed him today. But his family isn’t sappy or emotional, and they’ve got a bad history that runs miles long. Something isn’t right.

“I’m okay, really,” Jughead says. “Town’s a bit of a wreck, but I’m okay. How are you and JB?”

“Just the same, just the same as always, baby. Town’s a bit of a wreck, eh? Isn’t it always. How so?”

He furrows his brows together, knowing she can’t see them. It doesn’t feel right to _not_ tell his mother the goings-on of his home, but it doesn’t feel right to tell her right _now_ , either. 

“Jug?” she says, voice becoming hoarse again. “Baby, you can always tell me what’s going on, can’t you? I’m your momma and I’ll never stop being your momma. You can count on me, baby.”

Red flags. _Count on her_? When could he count on her to be there after a hard day at school? Or to talk about girl problems with? (He nearly snorts at this. Girl problems. Like he’s ever _looked_ at a girl for more than three seconds consecutively.

Betty, his brain helpfully supplies, but he brushes it off. This was beside the point. _Gladys, Jughead. Focus._ )

He couldn’t even count on her to show up, for _once_ in her life, regardless of any other extra responsibilities she held besides.

He decides that he’ll tell her about Hermione because he knows she probably already knows. It’s been in the news, not just the _Blue and Gold_. Why she’s calling, he’s not totally sure. But this tidbit of information can’t harm anyone.

“Hermione Lodge got shot,” he says, shaking his head. “At the Jubilee last weekend. Did JB show you the article I wrote about it?” 

In what is possibly the cutest little sister move in the history of time, JB reads the _Blue and Gold_ every month. Sometimes she’ll text him about the articles he writes to debate with him whether artificial intelligence was truly good for the planet, and sometimes she’ll send him quotes that she particularly likes. They hadn’t been in contact in months, but he knows she still reads the articles. She’s not the type of person to stop.

She’s silent on the other end of the phone in prolonged shock for no more than three seconds, before she takes a deep breath and says, “No, JB didn’t show me. You write for the school newspaper, eh? That’s my boy.”

Red flags. She knows he writes for the school newspaper. The last time he called, he’d told her about it. 

“Isn’t it a bit more pressing that the mayor of your hometown got _murdered_?” Jughead asks her, closing his eyes. He needs to focus on the lilt of her voice. If JB was in danger up in Toledo with her, he needs to get up there and sort things out. 

“Oh, I suppose,” Gladys answers. “But all I care about right now is you and Jelly-belly, baby. When do you think the police will – ah!”

There’s a scuffle on the other end of the line, followed by a much deeper voice saying something and Gladys laughing uncomfortably. A soft shriek, like it’s coming from another room, uncomfortably familiar. Then Gladys must press the phone up against her ear again, because the outside sounds cut out abruptly.

“I gotta go, baby. I’ll call you back.”

“Mom?”

The line goes dead in his hands. 

He stands outside the double doors to the Bijou for another minute, reviewing the circumstance and coincidence that had to go into that phone call so that she could glean information from it that she didn’t already have access to. How out-of-character she sounded, like someone else had written the script for her to perform. The scuffle at the end. 

_What the hell was happening in Toledo? And, more importantly, was his sister safe?_

-

As he slides into the sticky recliner next to Archie, who is completely engrossed in the trailer for some new superhero movie, Jughead finds himself unable to stop thinking about the last thirty seconds of his phone call. 

Something was wrong with Gladys – this much he was certain of. Perhaps she was drunk, or perhaps she was hiding something. It was impossible to tell which it was, or which was worse, until he saw his mother’s face and could tell when her mannerisms revealed she was lying. 

(A little nose twitch, her left pinky scratching at the star tattoos by her eye. Next to his olfactory sense, his ability to pick up on physical tics was the best skill he possessed to date. Anyone he spent time with could tell that Jughead knew exactly when they were uncomfortable, or scared, or lying. Betty tugged at the end of her ponytail before she had to do something she didn’t like. Archie tapped each finger on his thigh twice in specific guitar riff patterns before lying to his father. Jughead himself fiddled with the zippers on his jacket before he did something risky.

Everyone did _something_. But his skills were only useful when he could study those whom he suspected, and phone calls provided little scope for observation. All he knew was all he heard.)

“How’s your mom?” Archie whispers over to Jughead as the next trailer pops onto the screen. Jughead reaches across the arm of the chair and snags a handful of popcorn from the bucket on Archie’s lap, noncommittally throwing a few pieces into his mouth as he thought over what to say.

“I’m not sure,” he decides, glancing over at Archie. “I think JB is in trouble.”

Archie’s eyebrow creases downwards as he turns to look at him. As much as Jughead gives Archie shit about being unobservant and having the mentality of an elementary-school boy, the man does care for his friends, and seeing how Jughead almost never talks about his worries (to anyone but Betty, it would seem), this must have worried Archie.

“What are you going to do about it?” he asks, keeping eye contact with Jughead for an uncomfortably long time before a loud sound on the screen diverts both boys’ attentions. 

“Not sure,” Jughead mutters.

He’s not truly unsure of his next moves. He knows he needs to drive up to Toledo to check out the situation himself – see his baby sister in the flesh – observe Gladys’ mannerisms to determine what she wasn’t saying. The issue with this plan was his father, who, when Jughead had left the house to drive to the Bijou on his blissfully smoke-free bike, had been near passed out on the couch of their tiny trailer, surrounded by beer cans. 

Jughead wasn’t sure how he was supposed to convince his father, who can’t even stand straight up without his help, to drive to Toledo to check on the rest of their estranged family. Frankly, FP Jones wasn’t crazy about visiting Gladys when he was sober. It was going to be damn near impossible to convince him to go _now_. 

But Archie accepts Jughead’s resignation and uncertainty on the topic and lets it go, focusing on the movie as the previews finally end. Shoveling another handful of popcorn into his mouth, Jughead turns his attention to the silver screen, working through sentences of convincing words that he could possibly use to convince his deadbeat father to get up off his ass and do something right in his life. 

The movie ends sooner than it had begun, and in a matter of what seems like minutes Jughead finds himself squinting in the evening sunlight as he and Archie exit the theater, the latter talking animatedly about the film. Jughead’s silence over everything soon caused Archie to shut up, glancing over to see if something was wrong as the two of them stood by the curb.  
Wordlessly, Archie pats Jughead on the back, in a gesture that is strangely comforting.

Jughead powers up his phone to find no additional missed calls – he’s not sure whether to be happy or upset about this information – but two missed text messages from Betty. Archie, looking over his shoulder, reads the texts alongside him.

_Hi! I know you’re at a movie with Arch. (Saw you guys outside the theater for about two seconds. I’m at the mall picking up shoes for Alice.) Just figured I’d send you this news article – I think you’d like it._

_Plus, the author has a penchant for semicolons. Reminds me of someone else I know. :)_

“She’s sweet,” Archie says suddenly, startling Jughead enough for him to lock his phone on accident. Archie doesn’t seem to notice as he nods at Jughead, ready to split ways. “Cute, too. Right?”

Praying desperately that his face doesn’t flush beyond belief, Jughead stutters out some semblance of a response.

Because Betty Cooper _was_ cute. Ridiculously so.

But she was so much more than that – damn smart and witty and strong and kind in unprecedented ways, making his heart stutter over itself on a normal day and absolutely causing heart disease on days when she was riled up about something or when she was in a good mood. Gorgeous and terrifying when she blew the loose strands of hair out of her face as she smacked the punching bag the first time he’d invited her over, giddy with adrenaline and dealing with her feelings in some other way than self-harm. Intriguing when she chewed on the end of her pencil, or absentmindedly clicked the nib of her pen in and out, her tics and anxieties manifesting in ways he could observe, notice. Her mannerisms revealing her personality traits. She was ethereal, otherworldly, lovely.

Cute, yeah. (Blonde baby hairs framing her face, little tiny freckles on her nose, crinkling green eyes.) Smart, definitely. (Seated on his desk, pointing out flaws in his factual prose, debating him over whether democracy led to hypocrisy or revolution.) His type, completely. (Slamming down a dry comment and a fresh mug of coffee – black with a pinch of sugar, no questions asked.)

This information is quickly blown out of his brain as Archie, still deep in thought, says, “I wonder what she’d say if I asked her out on a date.”

The protective instinct in him, still lying near to the surface of his emotional range after his call with his mother, begs Archie to lay off Betty, especially when handling a relationship in her near-breaking point could quite possibly send her spiraling for good, but he fights it off, forcing himself to remember that Betty was not his sister nor was she his girlfriend, and therefore he had no right to unjustly interfere in her love life. And after he’d made excuses for the protectiveness, the jealousy remained, for some reason that Jughead didn’t really wish to know ( _preferred_ not to know, more accurately). And then the happiness for his best friend – because Betty would treat him right, and he would treat her right, and Jughead knew this – and then the artist in him calling bullshit on the oh-so-typical plot line that is so backwater and _80’s teen_ that it physically _hurts_ – and all in all it is an extremely confusing two seconds before Jughead manages to clap Archie on the shoulder and say, “Jesus, Arch, this isn’t some John Hughes movie. No kissing in the rain, no speakers below her window. Just ask her.”

_But you_ just _blew her off for Josie_ , he wants to cry, _and how many times have you blown her off before now? More than I know and more than she wants to count and God, isn’t this just going to be the perfect little domestic disaster?_

_And how many days before you blow her off again for someone more your type?_

“Maybe I will,” Archie says, nodding as he makes the uncomfortable type of eye contact with Jughead again. “I mean, unless you mind?”

If Jughead had been drinking something at the time, it would have been spit out of his mouth in a dramatic and unnecessary gesture of shock.

He’s not exactly sure what he sputters in indignation – something along the lines of _Why would I mind?_ or _She’s not mine to give away, she’s her own person, for God’s sake, Archie, she’s Betty_ or _Oh God, of course not_ – but it’s enough to satisfy Archie, and he says goodbye in much higher spirits than he had said hello.

Archie leaves Jughead to rub his temple with two fingers, wondering over his extremely emotional response to a simple question and his own nonpartisan manner, threatening to stab him in the back. His mother’s abrupt phone call and loose threads dangling tantalizingly in front of his face – his emotions about Betty, tangling themselves into knots by themselves – his sudden want, or need, or some combination of the two, to take a _side_ – 

_Why now?_ he wonders. _Why here, why now, why at all?_

And suddenly he knows exactly how he’s going to convince his father.

-

Jughead slams around the trailer, gathering clothes from drawers and food from the pantry (and _Miami Purity_ , because shut up, it _was_ good) to shove in his riding pack. There’s enough room in his satchel for one other person to pack a whole week’s worth of clothing – this was the backpack he’d used last year, when he was technically homeless, and it had a lot of room for junk – but he hadn’t bothered packing his dad’s stuff yet, figuring the man would do it himself tomorrow morning when he was sober.

As he stalks past the door to the trailer and throws the bag onto the floor next to the couch, startling an extremely drunk FP Jones from his resting point on the couch, Jughead prepares himself for what he’s about to do.

“Jug,” he slurs. “Y’r ‘ome.”

“Yeah, Dad, I am,” Jughead says, grabbing his beanie from the counter and fitting it over his ears.

“Goin’ ‘omewher?” FP asks, kicking idly at the bag that lies at his feet. Jughead sighs (possibly melodramatically) and swallows back the pride.

He’s done enough sidestepping for today.

“Mom called.”

This drags FP’s attention away from the screen for long enough to make eye contact with Jughead. His fingers drift to the remote control, adjusting the volume lower, lower, until there’s no sound coming from the monitor and its tired, endless replay of the baseball game from last week.

The batter up at the plate whacks the ball, but no crack echoes through the monitor.

“S’he did?” he stutters, pushing himself up on his elbows, then hands, until he’s sitting up, and damn it, it’s some semblance of a victory.

“Yeah,” Jughead says, settling heavily into the stiff chair across the room and burying his temple into his weary hands. “Yeah, she did.”

It’s some matter of seconds before FP speaks again, and it’s clearer than before, through a less swollen tongue and clearer eyes. 

“What all’d she ‘ay?”

“She’s not well,” Jughead says, poking out from between his fingers to study his father’s mannerisms. It takes him a second to react to this news, the shock playing sleepily across his drowsy muscles. “JB isn’t, either. Gladys is hiding something. And…” He pauses for a second, watching his father bury his own head into his arms. “And I think it might have to do with Hermione Lodge’s murder.

The reaction here is immediate, a jerk up of the head. “What?” It’s not just the beer causing the fire in his voice now. “Boy, what’re you ‘n about?”

“Dad,” Jughead pleads, making eye contact with his estranged father, ever distant through the mountain of beer cans he’s piled around him. “We need to go to Toledo.”

It feels good to be so blunt, so direct, without dancing around his words or his father for once in his life. Not trying to make some sort of novel out of this situation, but rather being honest and sharp, concise and to the point, not making a long, unnecessary tangent out of the situation, and – 

_Well, there’s no need to be such a hypocrite, Jones_ , he thinks. 

FP seems to think he needed a little more stretching out and a little less directness in his statement, because he’s still staring at Jughead with cloudy eyes.

“ _Toledo_ , Dad,” Jughead says exasperatedly. “Where Mom and JB live. Nine hours from here? We could go tomorrow. I’m finally on break. We wouldn’t be long. You won’t even have to play nice.”

Something finally clicks in his head, and he stiffens his spine. The popping of the discs in his back makes Jughead cringe, but the sound is good to hear. Relieving.

For the first time in a _long_ time, FP Jones is sitting tall.

“No,” he says, with such comedic firmness that Jughead might nearly burst out laughing, if not for the gravity of the actual situation. (His finger waves in front of his face and everything, like he’s in some _fucking_ movie, some terribly directed teen movie, some _John Hughesian_ story that Jughead seems to be trapped in lately –) “No,” he repeats, popping his knuckles now too. “Like – ” a hiccup – “ _hell_ we’re going!”

“Why the hell _not_ , Dad?” Jughead shouts back, standing up, letting the anger in the pit of his stomach that’s been seething for weeks (if not months, years) now rise up into his throat. “What are you gonna find there that’s worse than _here_? What are you more _afraid_ of? Finding something you won’t like, or finding something you don’t want to drink away?”

“Boy, you st-stay quiet,” FP retorts, still pointing at Jughead with one bony finger. “You don’t know nothin’. You don’t know nothin’ about Gladys. She’ll eat you up, boy, and then s’me, you hear? We –” hiccup – “ _you_ are not seeing her or Jellybean, not nothin’. Y’ hear me, boy?”

“I’m not listening to you,” he threatens, standing over his father on the couch, who shakes his head slowly, still in a drunken stupor. “That’s my _baby sister_ and I’m pretty damn sure she’s in trouble and like _hell_ I’ll sit aside and let her get tortured. I don’t think so.”

He bends down to pick up the bag at his father’s feet and jerks his arm free of his father’s grasp, zipping up the top of the pack and stalking towards the kitchen counter. In a moment of surprising intelligence, he wrenches the cell phone cord and charger from the outlet, snags his phone from the counter, grabs the keys from the key tray, and turns to face his father.

Helpless, helplessly drunk, FP slumps down further on the couch, and Jughead feels something in him soften.

But then the keys dig into the soft of his palm and he remembers the shriek that sounded too much like JB and he spits, “Join me on the road if you want, Dad, but I’m leaving _now_ ” and slams out of the house, temper hotter than a firestorm.

Once he’s outside and yanking the cover off his bike, his temper starts to cool – not quite enough for him to regret anything he’s said to his father or for him to regret taking off like this, but enough so that he can take full breaths through his ribs again. He leans heavily against the bike, watching the silver of the handlebars reflect the setting sun, and just as he’s thinking about how much he _doesn’t_ want to take the first part of the road, in the dark, alone – 

His phone, somewhat miraculously, for the second time in a night, vibrates.

Betty, _bless_ her impeccable timing.

_Got any plans for break?_

He texts her back immediately.

_wanna take a road trip?_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> END OF ACT ONE.  
> hooray!  
> i'm so sorry this takes me forever to update but thank you all so so much for your lovely comments and kudos! <3  
> read other things i wrote when i was young and still wrote on wattpad! @ffairlyfloral  
> pin with me! @ffairlyfloral  
> or find me reading other VERY GOOD bughead fics right here! @clumsyhearts


	6. rumblings.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> act two, scene one - the road trip of the ages begins. a brief pitstop in a riverdale doppelgänger causes existentialism and family anger alike. terrible burgers are consumed and messages are listened to. end scene.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> suggested listening: _oh woman oh man_ by london grammar  
> in case you'd like to know where riverdale is in this canon: [google maps](https://www.google.com/maps/place/Riverdale,+NJ/@40.8026636,-74.3857552,9z/data=!4m5!3m4!1s0x89c304a9e0a86d53:0xdaa9039d11d40670!8m2!3d40.9939865!4d-74.3034823)

_betty cooper._

Betty doesn’t think she could be any further from Elizabeth Cooper right now. Hearing nothing but the roar of an engine and feeling nothing but the wind ripping at her skin and leather digging into her cheeks, she grips Jughead’s waist tighter and closes her eyes.

It’s uncharacteristic of her to be this rebellious. Taking a road trip – with _Jughead Jones_ and no one else – over fall break – and riding his motorcycle – and probably staying in a one-and-a-half-star motel – is nothing like Elizabeth, perfect daughter and student. It’s not even really characteristic of _Betty_ , either, but Betty is finding herself unable to stay in the house with her mother for longer than a few hours, and Alice is finding herself drunk more often than not, so obtaining her mother’s permission for this trip wasn’t exactly difficult.

Obtaining her _sober_ mother’s permission, well. Betty wasn’t willing to take the chance of waiting for the alcohol to leave her system. 

(Just to be safe, she left a note taped to the kitchen counter. _In Toledo with Jughead. I am safe. I have my phone and it’s charged. Love, Betty._ She sincerely doubted Alice would call. She might get an earful when she returned from Toledo, but Alice wouldn’t call unless she cared.)

The particular stretch of highway they were on was nearly empty, Jughead’s headlights being the only constant source of light on the road, but they’d been driving for nearly two hours now and Jughead, she could tell, was exhausted. His shoulders were slumping forwards, the top of his spine digging into her neck. Plus, the engine was groaning in the way that meant their gas was nearly spent.

She moves her head up next to his helmet and yells into his ear, “Pull over next exit.” He nods a little, flicking his turn signal up even though there’s no one else on the road to warn, and leans into the merge. It’s a little shaky considering his exhaustion, but they stay upright and alive until he kicks the stand down in the parking lot of a gas station, a likely-one-star motel located a block or so behind it and an off-brand burger joint attached to the building.

While Jughead fumbles for his wallet inside his leather jacket, and Betty wraps herself tighter in the too-big loaned leather as she fills the tank of the bike, the lights of the burger joint flicker with uncertainty. Wind whips through the little town, startling a few birds who lay on telephone wires (this late at night? Betty chuckles to herself watching the birds tear through the streets in desperate search for a place to sleep). 

Autumn is falling over the east coast – the air distinctly tastes chilly, bitter in the way that meant more leaves were to fall but snow was still far off. Wind pushes red and orange leaves around, forcing them to relocate constantly; the temperature of the wind bites at uncovered skin, but not enough to cause any hypothermia. Grey skies reign over hot sun, and when the sun does show her face, it’s with weak rays that fail to cause temperatures to climb over sixty. 

This is _Betty’s_ favorite time of year, although Elizabeth may claim that she loves summer most of all because it is when she can work. But Betty loves the crackling of the leaves and the colors and the biting realities of autumn more than anything.

The gas pump clicks, echoing through the empty parking lot and startling Jughead, who’d managed to dig out a battered twenty from his pockets. She laughs as she removes the nozzle and waves off his bill.

“I got it, Jug.”

He sighs, rubbing at his tired eyes. “Please, Betts, it’s my bike.”

“You drive, I’ll pay. Plus, we have to stay somewhere tonight. Save your twenty for the motel bill.” She’s already paying with her own battered twenty, pushing a loose strand of hair that escaped her ponytail behind her ears.

Jughead meets her eyes. He has a habit of making prolonged, soul-searching eye contact with her when he’s tired, and something in his eyes tonight makes it evident that he is watching her – dragging his eyes across her face, the neon flickering in and out of the blue in his eyes. Something buried beneath the color keeps her digging for the thoughts he keeps hidden, like the corners of book pages folded just enough to pique her interest, but every time she flips to the page, the words blur and she’s locked out again.

 _What are you thinking?_ she wants to ask, but not now. Jughead is tired, and hungry, and asking now might open up a conversation she wasn’t ready to have. Delving into the perpetual butterflies she keeps shaking off and the constant need to talk to him and her loss of interest in the now-single Archie Andrews was not something she wished to do tonight. (This was perhaps the first sign that something with her was amiss – freshman-year Betty, and probably sophomore-year Betty, too, would have jumped aboard this opportunity to satisfy her craving for the redhead next door with vigor, tackling it like it was one of her projects. But junior-year Betty is tired of redheads who toy with her.

Unfortunately, said redhead does not feel the same way, and seemingly realized that she existed approximately three hours ago, where he began calling her repeatedly and leaving the world’s cheesiest messages.

_Hey! Betty! I think your brownies are pretty sweet. I also think you’re pretty sweet. Wanna hang? Call me back. Oh, this is, uh, Archie, by the way. Bye!_

_Betty, you at home? Wanna hang out and watch a movie? Maybe one of those romantic movies you’ve been begging me to watch since we were seven? I’m free if you are!_

Perhaps the worst of all was the song he’d sung, complete with guitar accompaniment. She did not wish to remember the exact details, but there had been a great deal about her blonde ponytail.)

Being pissed at her mom and eager to see Jughead’s family again were two likely reasons why she agreed so readily to ride nine hours across the country to Toledo with Jughead, but another was probably to avoid Archie. As much as she feels bad about it, she really can’t deal with Archie’s constant phone calls and ringing her doorbell, begging for a chance, when the last thing she needs right now is another person to take care of. Escaping just seemed easier than having to tell him no and watch his face melt into the sad puppy expression he pulled on her frequently when something she had done made him upset.

If she’s being completely, totally honest, being with Jughead is _easy_. Their friendship had developed rapidly in grade school and blossomed quickly and smoothly in high school, never feeling forced, artificial, unpleasant. Writing with him in the Blue and Gold, laying on the ground together, whispering over the phone at midnight after one of her nightmares, juggling double shifts together in the summer at Pop’s, working him out of his depressive episodes – it all felt _natural_ , a familiar static hum resonating through the chords of their relationship. Whereas being with Archie or even her beloved Veronica at times feels nice, but flat, Jughead’s presence had always entertained her in the right ways.

It hadn’t taken much persuasion from him – a few simple pokes – before she’d agreed to take off with him. Let go of Elizabeth for a week and just be Betty. Betty, who loves autumn and wraps herself in leather that smells just like Jughead and stays in one-star motels and rides a motorcycle for the sake of her friend.

Let go of Elizabeth and be _Betty and Jughead_ for a week.

Betty and Jughead, teen investigators extraordinaire. Betty and Jughead, the best part about childhood friendships developing and maintaining strength as they aged. Betty and Jughead, simple friends and nothing more. Jughead was far from simple himself, but their friendship had never wavered from the simplicity of human connection. Around him, she could exist, without thinking too hard about it. 

Yet another reason why she doesn’t wish to test this little slice of friendship they share, carefully defined borders glaring red around her eyes. So instead of asking him what he’s thinking, she lets him scour her face for a second longer, letting him read her expression as if he’s reading a book, before she tosses him her helmet and offers to meet him inside after he parks the bike.

He nods, snapping from his trance, and hops aboard the newly-filled bike as she jogs inside.

-

If not for the fact that they were camped two hours out from Riverdale, the diner could have been Pop’s if she didn’t look too hard. The counter shines and the air stinks of grease, the kitchen quieting this late at night. Jukebox tucked into the corner, coffee pot sitting on the counter, a friendly blonde waitress meeting Betty’s eyes as she closes the door softly behind her. 

“You can sit where you like,” the waitress assures Betty in a thick New York accent, who nods at her with a smile. 

Betty chooses a booth near the window and turns to the woman, watching as she arches a perfectly penciled blonde eyebrow upwards. Sickeningly, she feels a rush of familiarity, a sinking feeling in her gut as she realizes this could so easily be her future – working at Pop’s for the rest of her life, serving coffee at night to the Jugheads of the world, never leaving the town she loved but was quickly outgrowing. 

She brushes off the feeling, shoving it deep into her stomach and taking out the bitterness on her palms, before asking, “Where exactly am I right now?”

The woman laughs as she wipes down the glistening counter, for lack of a better task. “Danville, Pennsylvania,” she answers, nodding towards Jughead as he pushes open the door and searches for the booth Betty had chosen. “About two hours north of York.”

As Jughead slides into the booth opposite Betty, turning towards the waitress as well, she can see he recognizes the drawling accent as well as she. Riverdale was just far enough away from the city to lose the accent, but just close enough that it was near impossible to forget. At Pop's, which attracted travellers as well as locals, the travellers were often distinguished by their New York accent. True Riverdale locals neither had the drawl nor the bite of a Manhattan dialect. Betty and Jughead often fought over the tip jar during summers at Pop's via battles in which they attempted to serve more New Yorkers - a battle which Betty frequently sabotaged so Jughead might take home the extra ten dollars. “You from New York?” he asks the waitress, tossing the rucksack in the corner of the booth.

“Isn’t everyone?” the woman answers, and Betty concedes her point with a nod to Jughead as the two of them place orders (him a double burger with fries, her a single burger with fries and a milkshake.) She disappears into the kitchen. Despite the fact that it’s only ten-thirty at night, the diner is near empty, a couple near the back seated and talking animatedly, but quietly. 

Jughead pulls off his beanie unceremoniously and buries his head in his hands, running his fingers through his black curls. She reaches across the table, leaving her hand palm-up for him to grab when he’s finished collecting himself. He does, gripping her hand with such tangible exhaustion that she wishes he could just sleep easily for a few hours at this very moment.

 _What are you thinking?_ she wants to ask, as she glances at him through the mess of curls around his eyes, but she can’t read him without meeting his eyes. Even if he does look up at her, she knows she’ll hit the wall he puts up, the boundary of friendship glaring red around her eyes, begging her not to push. Pushing has repercussions, and she likes Jughead’s company too much to risk losing it in satisfying her curiosity. 

When he does look up at her, all she can read from his guarded expression is that he’s tired.

They stay quiet for a moment before Jughead mutters, almost so that she can’t hear it, “I’m sorry.”

“For what?”

“Just… sorry I dragged you so far from home on fall break. It sucks that you have to sit on the back of a motorcycle with me for a fuck-trillion hours and it sucks that you won’t get to see _your_ family. You know? I’m just sorry. I –”

Betty squeezes his hand. He stops and glances back up at her, meeting her eyes underneath the hair that falls in his face.

“I’m not,” she says. “Sorry. I’m not sorry about this and I don’t regret it.”

He chuckles. “You don’t have to lie.”

“I’m not.”

He’s not looking at her anymore.

“I’m serious, Jug. I wanted to come with you because I know this is important to you and I know it’s also tough for you and you _asked_ me to. But I also _wanted_ to come with you. Because I like spending time with you. Because I like _you_.”

This wins a small smile from him, a little upward tug of the lips. She grins back and squeezes his hand again before letting go to push a stray piece of hair back into place. 

“I like you too, Betts,” he mumbles into the table, which earns a grin from her. 

“What was that?” she says, laughing, nudging his shoulder with her fingertips.

“I like you too, Betts!” he says, pushing his hair back and meeting her eyes fully for the first time since he’s sat down. There’s a little bit of the sparkle she’s familiar with, buried deep in his eyes, just before the barrier, but it disappears near as soon as it comes as one of their phones vibrates.

It’s not hers, she determines quickly. (Her ringtone is always on, per demand of Alice Cooper, after she’d missed a single call in eighth grade. _Elizabeth Cooper!_ she’d been faced with when returning home. _What is the point of having a phone if you don’t answer it?_ Hasty apologies had not lessened her sentence – two weeks grounded.) Jughead digs around in his pockets before pulling his phone out, squinting at the name displayed across the screen, and swearing softly.

“Mom?” he says as he puts the phone up to his ear. 

She stands and wanders towards the counter, waiting for the blonde waitress to return with the food they’d ordered in order to give him some privacy. They’d been in close quarters for hours now, and she knows he values his privacy as much as she values her locked diaries. On habit, though, Betty tries not to listen to phone conversation. She hates only hearing one side of the story and she knows it makes people uncomfortable when she is blatantly listening to what they’re saying on a private line. (She remembers Polly, twirling the landline around her fingers and laughing jauntily when she picked up the phone for a boy – shooing Betty from sight, whispering that she shouldn’t be such a creep. Alice, taking work calls in the middle of dinner and griping about her children listening in when she did so – never mind that she made no effort to leave the dinner table nor reschedule the calls. Hal, muttering to his buddies in the basement, sipping his beer and yelling at Betty to leave her toys and go straight to bed on suspicion of eavesdropping.

 _It’s not eavesdropping if you know I can hear you_ , Betty pleaded, but it was to no avail. She would learn her lesson.)

Jughead keeps his voice low as he talks, but he’s evidently angry at Gladys, tugging his fingers through his hair with barely contained spite. She can still hear him spit acid at his mother. “Put JB on right now, Mom, I swear to God.”

The blonde waitress returns as Betty is absentmindedly tracing patterns in the cleaning fluid still drying on the counter, and sets the plates of grease in front of her with a tired grin. _So much_ of Betty is present in this poor woman. Everything from the immaculate ponytail to the worried nails and dark circles accompanying a practiced polite smile reminds Betty of her own self. Cheery voice, late nights, coffee kept warm and counters kept clean. 

The name stitched below the collar of the fifties-style uniform reads _Terese_ , though, and Betty releases the breath she hadn't known she was holding before returning the tired smile. “These are yours, sweetheart.”

“Thank you,” Betty says, sliding a twenty across the counter. Terese rings her up, hitting the cash register with practiced vigor. She knows the feeling – the one at Pop’s gets jammed, too.

“Boyfriend okay?” Terese asks as she counts the crisp bills. Betty offers a soft smile to her, unable to decide whether to explain that Jughead was _not_ her boyfriend and validate her love life to a stranger in Danville, or to just let the offense and error slide. While she's sure Jughead may have corrected the woman - a stickler for a factual story - she's tired, and playing the part of Jughead's girlfriend to a woman whom she would never see after tonight is much easier than playing the role of the woman who's somehow offended by the assumption that she might be dating the man she's travelling cross-country with. 

“Family problems,” she offers in return. The waitress nods in understanding.

Betty shoves two of the extra dollars of change back into the tip jar with a nod towards the girl - her strange double - and returns to the table. She isn't managing to shake the feeling of dread gathering in the pit of her stomach – the absolute familiarity and certainty that this diner holds – how close she is to having this as her future. A college dropout, serving coffee on the night shift, the only person on staff. Listening to the same music night after night, wondering when she would finally be able to _leave_.

"Do not hang up on me," Jughead threatens to the phone as she slides back into the booth, shoving the plate in front of him with practiced precision. "Gladys - _Mom_ \- shit." Slamming the phone down on the table, he closes his eyes and growls in frustration, the lines on his face more drawn than usual. 

She wishes he would open up to her, tell her what was so wrong. All she’d managed to wrangle from him before they left was that he was worried his mom was _getting into some shit_ , and that he wanted to check on JB. But the tone of this phone call, the way his anxiety was manifesting today – something’s not right. Not just normal not-right, but dangerous. 

Betty wonders what exactly Jughead means by _some shit_.

“What are you thinking?” she asks, surprising herself. He glances up at her over the burger (which is nowhere near as good as a Pop’s burger – she relieves herself of some of that doubt simply by tasting it) and sighs.

“That I don’t know what I’m doing,” he tells her, setting down the remainder of his burger. “My mom knows I’m coming, but she’s insistent that everything is fine. I haven’t been able to speak to JB at all – not even on her number. And I can’t call my mom, I have to wait for her to call me. It’s so…”

“Weird?” Betty supplies.

“Sure,” he says, shrugging. “I just keep thinking, what am I doing? What am I _trying_ to do? Can I even help at all? And, I know it’s stupid, but this is such a Jones family problem to have that it makes me wonder…” He lets the sentence trail off in order to shove a few fries in his mouth. “Will I be doing the exact same things when I’m my mom’s age?”

She can’t form the right words immediately, so she swipes her finger through the whipped cream at the top of milkshake, watching as Jughead searches his surroundings for any comfort. He tends to search any uncomfortable situation for something he’s familiar with – physical surroundings he recognizes and draws comfort from calm his unsteady nerves better than reassuring words do. His eyes land on his rucksack, shoved with their collective belongings for a week, and her. 

Two things from home.

“Well,” Betty says, licking the rest of the whipped cream from her hands, “I don’t know much about the Jones family dynamic, but you love your sister and you love your mom and it’s natural that you’re worried about them. Visiting them, checking up on them – that’s a great first step you’ve already taken. And even if you really can’t help –”

“That’s what scares me,” he confesses, tapping a rhythm on nerves onto the neon table. “What if… If we get all the way to Toledo and I can’t even help? What then? Am I expected to just act like everything’s fine and get all the way back up to Riverdale and fight with my dad for _nothing_?” 

“No,” she says, shaking her head solidly. “No. Even if you can’t do anything, you’ve at least tried. Knowing for certain that there is nothing you can do is terrible, but at least you’ve tried everything you can. You can live with that.”

Jughead sighs, shoulders slumping further over the table. “It’s gonna suck,” he says lowly, taking another bite out of the burger. 

Betty reaches over the table and pats his forearm. “I know,” she murmurs. “And as for your last question… Well, an extremely smart man told me last year that we are not our families.”

Jughead laughs softly, leaning over the table to steal one of her fries. 

“You are not doomed to make the same mistakes just because it’s in your blood. You are your own person – and maybe a part of that is your family, your blood, but most of it is up to you to decide. What was it? “They’re parents. They’re all crazy.” Right?”

By the time she finishes her little spiel, she’s considering a career in motivational speaking aimed at Jughead Jones. He shakes his head fondly, murmuring, “Thanks, Betts,” and when she searches through his eyes she can see some emotion there, lying in the depths of dark blue. 

Gratitude. And something else, still hidden behind the barrier. 

But she's cracking some of those bricks.

-

The room they’ve booked at the solidly one-star motel down the street has three folding chairs in miserable condition, two lumpy beds, and one rat, peeking out of the wall in the corner nearest to the trash can. The carpet has ominous stains that Betty prays are just from soda spills, and the springs on the bedframes are rusted to within an inch of their lives.

“Home sweet home,” he quips, tossing his bag on the bed closer to the window. Betty laughs halfheartedly before pulling her bag from the back of his rucksack, digging through the drawstring to find her sweatshirt and shorts. In all honesty, she’d under-packed for this trip, but if she needed to do laundry it would be an easy way to escape Jughead’s family when arguments got just acidic enough to warrant the non-family members to vacate the premises. 

Jughead takes a pair of shorts and an old _Nightmare on Elm Street_ shirt that Betty vaguely remembers buying back when they were in junior high school – she’d bought it large, promising him he’d grow into it later. (Poor younger Jughead was all limbs, all gangly bones. He grew too fast for his family to afford and went days without changing the one shirt he owned that fit him properly. In an effort to alleviate this, she'd shoved the graphic tee into his arms, insisting that he at least take it to sleep with. Apparently, he'd taken her advice to a T.) He disappears into the bathroom to shower, leaving his Serpents jacket spread across the bed he’d claimed.

She collapses onto the other bed, the material on her sleep clothes gathered in her raw fist, and pulls her phone from her back pocket. Little red bubbles angrily mar her home screen. 

_Seventy-eight missed phone calls? One hundred missed texts?_

For all except one text message from Veronica (three heart emojis in response to Betty’s numerous attempts to contact her previously – poor V was still out from school after her mother’s death), these messages were all labelled from Archie Andrews.

She sits up and presses play, listening to his voice ring from her phone. Maybe normally, it would be a comfort to know that Archie was in her corner, leaving her corny messages because he knew she would listen to every single one – but tonight it is agitating to listen to him talk about her as if he’s just now opened his eyes to her existence.

_Hey, Betty. Are you home? I’d love to hang out. I’m down for whatever. Except for Indian food because I really just don’t like it. Call me back. Love from Arch._

__

_Betty? Hello? Are you ignoring me? Haha, I’m kidding because you would never do that. You’re Betty, after all, and you’re sweet and kind and adorable. Call me when you get this, okay?_

____

_Oh, Betty, you’re so fine, you’re so fine you blow my mind! Hey Betty! Please call. It’s Arch._

_____ _

Betty listens through some twenty of these before Jughead makes his way back into the room, complaining about the rust-colored water and the cockroaches in the sink. She's only half-listening to him. As she shuts off her phone, she wipes her hands, which feel a little clammy, on the bedspread before standing to claim the bathroom.

_____ _

(She wouldn’t dream of showering in this shithole – Alice had taught her some upper-middle class common sense, and the most basic of this knowledge was to never shower where you would not wash your feet – but she at least wants to claim a bit of privacy to _change_.)

_____ _

“Betty.”

_____ _

She turns around, clothes slung across her shoulder. “Yes?”

_____ _

Jughead’s looking at the bedspread, stained with rusty handprints. 

_____ _

She glances down at her palms, covered in slick blood. Liquid gathers under her fingernails in little crescent moons and runs down the fronts of her fingers in rivulets. Red pools in her palms as if she had just dipped her hands in paint and pulled them out permanently stained. Instinctively, she closes her fingers over the blood – _as if there is ever anything to hide from Jughead_ – and feels a little tear slide down her face.

_____ _

She didn’t even _notice_.

_____ _

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> PLEASE find it in your hearts to forgive me for HOW LONG i took writing this terrible and short chapter - life decided to kick my ass for about three months! 
> 
> just 'cos i love it - waitress betty was already a bit of this canon, but if you'd like more, the amazing and wonderful [heavyliesthecrown](https://archiveofourown.org/users/heavyliesthecrown/pseuds/heavyliesthecrown) has this gorgeous story where betty is every bit the tired waitress she so desperately wants to escape in this story - read ["among the wildflowers"](https://archiveofourown.org/works/16347521/chapters/38249060) here.
> 
> if you'd fancy to find me elsewhere, i am  
> on wattpad: [@ffairlyfloral](https://www.wattpad.com/user/ffairlyfloral)  
> on pinterest: [@ffairlyfloral](https://www.pinterest.com/ffairlyfloral/)  
> or right here on ao3: [@clumsyhearts](https://archiveofourown.org/users/clumsyhearts)

**Author's Note:**

> i know i'm stupid but i craved validation and more betty & jughead content out there in this world and this story is me, fulfilling both ends.
> 
> \- i write (even more infrequently) on wattpad: @ffairlyfloral  
> \- pin with me: @ffairlyfloral  
> \- or find me reading other bughead fics right here on ao3: @clumsyhearts


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